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A Century of Excavation in the 
Land of the Pharaohs 


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IL XOURIDIRUANIEIE (SMCANIMGHS, (One INS IMSOMUES, IMAL, (CAMURO) IMNUISIE CIM. 








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MEN Rem sngy psrenqre™ 


Century of Excavation 


in the 


Land of the Pharaohs 


BY 


JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S. 


AUTHOR OF ‘‘ WONDER TALES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD” 
LANDS AND PEOPLE OF THE BIBLE,” ‘‘THE SEA KINGS OF CRETR” 
“THE STORY OF THE PHARAOHS,” ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED WITH 32 PLATES 
SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR THIS VOLUME 





Fleming H. Revell Company 


New York Cuicaco ToRoNTO 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 
BY 
WILLIAM CLOWES & Sons, LIMITED, 


LONDON AND BECCLES, 


PREFACE 


T is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the 
| considerable, if spasmodic, interest which is 
taken in the results of research in Egypt, no 
adequate account of the work of excavation has 
ever been written. T’he student who wishes to 
learn how, when, and where the facts and objects 
which interest him were discovered, has himself 
to excavate the desired information from the 
innumerable volumes of reports issued by the 
various exploration societies. It is much to be 
desired that someone who is master of the subject, 
and preferably, someone who has had actual 
experience of the work of excavation, should tell 
the story, not in a manner suited only to the ears 
of experts, but so that the educated public on 
whom in the long run excavation must depend 
for its resources, could appreciate and enjoy a 
narrative which ought to be as fascinating as any 
story of search for buried treasure. 

This volume makes no pretension to the dis- 
charge of sucha task. All that it attempts to do is 
to outline the story of certain aspects of the great 
work which has given us back so many of the 
wonders of the ancient civilisation of Egypt. Its 
omissions are, doubtless, many; but two will be 
at once conspicuous to anyone who has the 
slightest acquaintance with the subject. Nothing 
is said of the Search for the Cities, which in the 

3 


4 PREFACE 


closing years of the nineteenth century created so 
much interest, and resulted inso many identifica- 
tions of sites; and nothing is said of the great 
work of Papyrus-hunting which has added so 
much to our knowledge of ancient life. ‘These 
two matters were left untouched for reasons 
which seemed valid. In the case of the Cities, 
many of the identifications of the ‘nineties are 
at present being questioned, and it seemed better 
to leave the matter till something like agreement 
is reached. Inthe case of the Papyri, the subject 
has become so specialised, and has developed so 
large a literature of its own as to render impossible 
any attempt to deal with it, on the scale which it 
deserves, in such a volume as the present. 

It may be that at some time in the not far 
distant future, when controversy has resulted in 
more or less general agreement as to the sites, 
these two aspects of Egyptian excavation may be 
dealt with in a volume which may bea sequel and 
companion to this. My indebtedness to many 
authorities is manifest on almost every page of 
the book; but I wish specially to acknowledge 
my debt to Professor Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, 
D.C.L., F.R.S., not only for the kindness which 
has allowed me to use the material of several of 
the plates in the book (7, 9, 10), but also for the 
constant inspiration and stimulus which his work 
has given to me, as to so many other students of 
the wonderful civilisation of Ancient Egypt. 


JAMES BAIKIE. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 
Tue Story oF THE PIONEERS 
CHAPTER II 


MariETTE AND HIS WorK 


CHAPTER III 


Tue Brcinnrincs OF THE Mopern PEriop 


CHAPTER IV 


Tue PyraMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


CHAPTER V 


Work AMONG THE TEMPLES 


CHAPTER VI 


Buriep Royatrigs . 


CHAPTER VII 


"TUTANKHAMEN AND HIS SPLENDOURS 


CHAPTER VIII 


Lirz, Arrs, anD Crarts in THE Lanp oF THE NILE 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


PLATE 


PAGE 


1. Portrait Statue of Thothmes III, Cairo Museum Frontispiece 


. Detail of Decoration, ‘Tomb of Sety I 
. Temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu 


. Great Pyramid and Sphinx 


on rI Amn > Ww N 


Dynasty 


g. Hatshepsut’s Temple. Der el- nae General view 


5 


. Temple of Edfu—The Pylon, and View from the Pylon 


. Gold Pectorals of Senusert II and IT, XIIth uae 
. Diadems of Princess Khnumit, Gold work, XIIth 


FACING PAGE 


. Wall of Chamber, Tomb of Sety I, Valley of the Kings 


10 
18 


30 


6 


PLATE 
1c, 


II. 
12. 
13. 
14. 
15. 


16. 
ee 
18. 
19. 


20. 
21. 
22. 


23. 
24. 


25. 


26. 
om 


28. 
29. 
30. 


a4. 


a7. 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


North Colonnade, Der el-Bahri; “ Proto-Doric” 
Columns 

Reliefs, Der el- Bahri 

Karnak, Avenue of Sphinxes 

Karnak, Nave of Hypostyle Hall 

Karnak, Columns of the Side-Aisle, Hypostyle Hall 

Karnak, View from the North; Obelisks of Hatshep- 
sut, and Thothmes I : 

Luxor, Forecourt of Amenhotep Ili . t 

Luxor, Papyrus-Bud Columns and Colossi of Ramses 

Colonnade in ‘Temple of Sety I, Abydos 

Bracelets of Ist Dynasty Queen, Chain and Gold Seal, 
Vith Dynasty, with XIIth Dynasty Goldsmith’s 
Work ; 

Entrance to the Valley of ne icine Thebes 

Tomb of Ramses IX, Valley of the Kings . 

Granite Head of Tutankhamen, Cairo Museum . 

Decoration froma Theban Tomb . ; 

Decoration from a Theban Tomb: Sowing, Reaping, 
the Vintage ; 

Head of the Hathor-Cow, Der i Bahri 

Colossus of Ramses II, Luxor } 

Portrait-Statue of Mentuemhat, Cairo Museum . 

Vth Dynasty Relief-Work, Tomb of Ptah-Hetep 

XIXth Dynasty Relief-Work, Temple of Sety I, 
Abydos 

XiIXth Dynasty Relief. Work, Tanne of Rane I, 
Luxor 

XXth Dynasty Relief: Work, rei ble of Rijcises IT, 
Medinet Habu 

Ptolemaic Relief-Work, Kom Caries 


FACING PAGE 


g2 

96 
104 
112 


116 


120 
124 
128 
136 


144 
148 
152 
178 
184 


192 
200 
208 
216 


224 
228 
232 


236 
240 


A CENTURY OF 
EXCAVATION IN 
Ee AND cOB 
THE PHARAOHS 


CHAPTER I 


THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


HE story of the beginnings of research 
| into the wonders of antiquity in Egypt 


is unique in at least one point. In no 
other land does a conquering army march at 
the head of the pioneers of exploration; but 
the true beginnings of the century and a quarter 
of research which has given to us so many 
wonders from the Land of the Nile are to be 
found with that amazing troop of learned camp- 
followers who accompanied Napoleon’s army on 
the expedition of 1798. The wonders of ancient 
Egypt had never altogether been blotted from 
the memory and the interest of man, as was the 
case with some of the other lands of the Classic 
East. The pages of Herodotus, never fuller or 
more vivid than when he is dealing with Egypt, 
prevented that oblivion ; and therefore Herodotus 
has some right to be named at the very beginning 
of the story of the exploration of ancient Egypt 

7 


8 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


as the pioneer of pioneers. But the world was 
first really awakened to the richness of the 
Treasury of Egypt by the colossal production, 
twelve volumes of plates and twenty-four of 
text, which was the result of the untiring labours 
of Vivant Denon and his collaborators—the 
famous Description de l’Egypte—a work almost 
comparable in scale and grandeur with the 
monuments which it described. Few armies 
have left behind them such a memorial of their 
passage across a land—the more credit to the 
man whose inexhaustibly fertile brain conceived 
the idea of making even war subserve the interests 
of science. 

Unfortunately, however, the tie with inter- 
national strifes and jealousies, which had drawn 
the French savants originally to the Nile Valley, 
remained unbroken for many years; and 
questions of archeology were continually com- 
plicated by questions of national pride and 
prestige, so that the early story of Egyptian 
exploration is not the story of pure research, 
conducted for the love of truth and of antiquity, 
but very often merely the story of how the 
representative of France strove with the repre- 
sentative of Britain or Italy for the possession of 
some ancient monument whose capture might 
bring glory to his nation, or profit to his own 
purse. There are few more melancholy chapters 
in the story of human frailty than those in which 
the early explorers of Egypt (if you can dignify 
them by such a name) describe how they 
wrangled and intrigued, lied and cheated, over 
relics whose mutilated antiquity might have 


THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 9g 


taught them enough of the vanity of human 
wishes to make them ashamed of their pettiness. 

Dr. Macalister has told us in the Cambridge 
Ancient History that “it is impossible to give 
any complete survey of the history of Egyptian 
excavation.” ‘This is true for the later period, 
because the field is so vast, and the workers are 
sO many ; it is not less true for the beginnings, 
because it is impossible to write a history of the 
scufflings of kites and crows—or rather, one 
might say, of ghouls. It must be almost a 
nightmare to the modern excavator, with his 
ingrained appreciation of the importance of 
even the very smallest object which may add 
to the knowledge of ancient lands and peoples, 
to think of the priceless material which was 
destroyed by the undiscriminating zeal of men 
like Belzoni, Drovetti, and their fellows, or if 
not destroyed, at least deprived of half its value 
by being torn from its historical place and 
connection. These were the lamentable days 
when interest in the antiquities of Egypt had 
advanced but little beyond that displayed by 
the gentleman of Addison’s first Spectator, 
whose Egyptian researches are thus described 
by himself—* I made a voyage to Grand Cairo 
on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid ; 
and as soon as I had set myself right in that 
particular, returned to my native country with 
great satisfaction,’ or by Lord Charlemont, who 
according to Johnson had nothing to tell of his 
travels except a story of a large serpent which 
he had seen in one of the pyramids of Egypt. 

In the early years of the nineteenth century, 


10 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


and, indeed, till Mariette in 1858 laid his masterful 
hand upon the key of the great treasure-house 
and allowed no one to spoil it but himself, there 
was a perfect orgy of spoliation carried on, not 
in the interests of science, but partly out of 
vanity, and partly out of greed. Every important 
or noble traveller had to add a few curios from 
Egypt to his miscellaneous collection gathered 
from half a dozen other lands, and sculptures, 
inscriptions, and papyri of the greatest value 
were thus uselessly dispersed in paltry private 
collections, where, when they had gratified a 
passing curiosity or ministered to a momentary 
spirit of emulation, they were allowed to gather 
dust through years of neglect, till at last the 
futile cabinet of curios was dispersed, and its 
items were lost sight of altogether. 

Some collections, such as those of Belzoni, 
Passalacqua, Drovetti, and a few others, had 
better fortune, and were finally purchased for 
one or other of the great European Museums, 
which nearly all formed the nucleus of their 
Egyptological collections in this fashion; but 
the amount of unnecessary loss of what can 
never now be replaced must have been deplorable. 

This “‘ unbridled pillage,’ as Maspero justly 
calis it, in which the consuls of the various 
European powers played an ignoble but doubtless 
lucrative part, lasted for more than thirty years, 
in spite of the protests of men like Champollion, 
who could understand the irreparable loss which 
was being inflicted on the infant science of 
Egyptology by this mutilation and confounding 
of the documents on which its future depended. 


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THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 11 


Among its practitioners were one or two men 
who were distinguished from the vulgar crowd 
of papyrus, scarab, and mummy hunters by a 
certain dim appreciation of the fact that the 
treasures with which they were dealing had a 
value greater than that of their price in the 
curio-market, and who have added at least a 
few interesting and remarkable items to the mass 
of Egyptian treasure which the nineteenth century 
accumulated, though our gratitude to them for 
this must always be qualified by the fact that we 
have no certain knowledge of what they lost 
and destroyed in the process, but can only judge 
from their own admissions that it must have 
been far more than they preserved. 

Of these men who may be pronounced guilty, 
but with extenuating circumstances, the most 
interesting, and perhaps the least harmful, was 
the inimitable Belzoni, to whose unwearying 
efforts we owe the opening of the Second Pyramid, 
the discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the most 
perfect example of the rock-hewn tomb of a 
Pharaoh of the New Empire, and the magnificent 
alabaster sarcophagus of Sety which is one of 
the treasures of the Soane Museum, London, 
besides several of the most important royal 
statues in the Egyptian Galleries of the British 
Museum. No one who wishes to realise what 
the young science had to endure at the hands 
of its first devotees can afford to neglect the 
extraordinary farrago of vanity and pomposity, 
ignorance and self-seeking, but also of patience 
and endurance, and a certain inborn instinct for 
what was either beautiful or valuable, which 


12 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


Belzoni has jumbled together under the sounding 
title—‘‘ Narrative of the Operations and Recent 
Discoveries within the Pyramids, ‘Temples, 
‘Tombs, and Excavations, in EGypT AND NUBIA.” 

Belzoni’s original object in going to Egypt 
was simply to get “ The Bashaw”’ to adopt a 
hydraulic machine for irrigation work—a project 
in which it is almost needless to say that he 
failed ; his knowledge of the precious material 
with which he was soon dealing was nothing at 
the beginning, and not much more at the end of 
his “‘ Researches and Operations’”’; he had a 
positive gift for quarrelling with everybody with 
whom he came into contact, Egyptian or 
European, and a mania for imputing the vilest 
motives to anyone who coveted any piece of 
antiquity on which he had set his own heart ; 
but with it all he had the flair of the true explorer 
for a promising site, and could foresee hidden 
treasures where his rivals dreamed of nothing, 
and with all his petulance he had a patience which 
was almost inexhaustible. It was these qualities 
which have made him the only explorer of those 
unhappy days whose name is really remembered, 
or deserves to be remembered, in connection 
with our knowledge of ancient Egypt. 

As to his methods, these, of course, were 
unspeakable, and the mere mention of them is 
enough to turn a modern excavator’s hair white. 
He finds the entrance of a royal tomb in the 
Western Valley of the Kings, and proceeds to 
open it—with a battering-ram made of two palm- 
logs! As to his reverence for the mighty dead 
of the past one sentence may suffice: “ Every 


THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 13 


step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or 
other.”” Again he describes his journey through 
a tomb-gallery which the modern excavator 
would have given his ears to see as Belzoni 
saw it. ‘‘ It was choked with mummies, and 
I could not pass without putting my face in 
contact with that of some decayed Egyptian ; 
but as the passage inclined downwards my own 
weight helped me on; however, [I could not 
avoid being covered with bones, legs, arms, and 
heads rolling from above.”’ 

The object of these ghoulish journeys was 
simply to plunder the coffins of their papyri, 
which, of course, were marketable, though as yet 
no one could read them; and there can be little 
doubt that far more was destroyed than was 
preserved by methods which were only a little 
above those of the Ramesside tomb-robbers who 
stripped the mummies of King Sebek-em-saf 
and Queen Nub-khas of their jewels, and then 
burned them. Such was Egyptian excavation 
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
and in the hands of one of its most distinguished 
practitioners, for Belzoni was an angel of light 
compared with some of his rivals, native or 
foreign. 

Fortunately, however, the time for such 
ignorant and sordid exploitation of the treasures 
of the past was not to last for long; though it 
lasted far too long for the welfare of Egyptology. 
By 1822, Jean Francois Champollion, working 
on the material supplied by the Rosetta Stone 
and the Philz Obelisk, and aided to some extent 
in his brilliant achievement by the previous 


14 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


labours of Akerblad and Young, gave to the 
world the key to the hieroglyphic inscriptions, 
so that the Egyptian monuments were no longer 
dumb. In 1828 came the second great general 
survey of the monuments under Rosellini and 
Champollion. 

It was now possible to read some, at least, 
of the inscriptions, and therefore to reach some 
approach to order in the classification of the 
monuments dealt with. The work suffered an 
irreparable loss by the early death of Champollion ; 
but the results of the expedition, presented in 
the ten volumes of the Monument: storichi dell’ 
Egitto e della Nubia constituted a great en- 
largement of real knowledge as opposed to 
the conjectures which had previously held the 
field. 

For a time after the Rosellini Expedition, the 
field was left to individual workers, of whom 
the most notable were two Englishmen, F. E. 
Perring and Colonel Howard Vyse, whose careful 
measurements of the pyramids, especially the 
great group of Gizeh, laid the foundation for 
all subsequent study of these wonderful 
structures. The work of Perring and Vyse was 
done in 1837, and three years later came the 
important Prussian Expedition directed by Karl 
Richard Lepsius, whose name must always 
stand among the foremost on the roll of 
Egyptology. 

Lepsius began with the Pyramid field at 
Memphis, where his theorising on the method 
of erection of the pyramids, though perhaps the 
part of his work by which he is most generally 


THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 15 


known, was of less importance than his investi- 
gation of the Old Kingdom tombs of the nobles 
in the necropolis, with its revelation of the life 
and culture of the Egypt of 3000 B.c. Thence 
the mission worked southwards, visiting the 
Fayum, and carrying out investigations as to 
the whereabouts of Lake Moeris and the 
Labyrinth. 

Passing on up the Nile Valley, Lepsius paid 
special attention to the tombs of the Middle 
Kingdom with their valuable pictures of Egyptian 
life a millennium later than the pyramid period, 
and also visited the site which has since become 
so famous as Tell el-Amarna. Not content 
with carrying his researches to the limit of the 
Second Cataract, where Rosellini had stopped, 
he pressed on through Nubia as far as Napata 
and Meroe, the former seats of that Ethiopian 
extension of Egyptian civilisation which gave to 
Egypt its ill-starred XXVth Dynasty, while on 
his return journey he visited the Sinai Peninsula, 
where he discovered and published the very 
valuable inscriptions left by the Egyptian expedi- 
tions which for many centuries were sent to 
work the copper mines at the Wady Maghareh 
and Serabit el-Khadem. He thus revealed to 
us the first chapter of the wonderfui story of 
Egyptian exploring and commercial activity, 
whose subsequent disclosures have at last almost 
succeeded in destroying the time-honoured myth 
which represented the ancient Egyptians as a 
cloistered nation, the Chinese of the Near East. 

The Denkmaler aus Atgypien und ALihopen, 
published from 1849 to 1858, gave to the 


16 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 


world the results of the wonderfully fruitful 
work of Lepsius, and has scarcely yet been 
altogether superseded as a source of illustration 
of the manners and culture of the ancient Egyp- 
tians. “* In the main,” says Dr. Macalister, “‘ the 
statement may stand, that Lepsius exhausted the 
general topographical study of the country.” 
Subsequent researches have done no more than 
to add filling in to the broad outlines which he 
drew with such care and certainty. 

But now the period of superficial survey of 
the wealth of material which Egypt offers to the 
student was drawing to a close, and was to be 
succeeded by the period in which excavation, 
conducted with constantly growing skill and 
attention to the most minute details, was to do, 
as it is still doing, what no amount of superficial 
cataloguing of the monuments of the land could 
ever do, and to give us back, not only pictures of 
the life of these ancient days, but the tools and 
weapons with which the Egyptian worked, fought, 
and hunted, the vessels which he used for all the 
purposes of life, the jewels with which he and 
his women-kind adorned themselves, the books 
which they read, and the songs which they sang ; 
all the material from which, if we have the vision 
and the insight, we may reconstruct the life of 
those far-off days; and to crown its gifts by 
calling up from the tomb the very men themselves 
who ruled and warred in the land of the Nile in 
the great days when Egypt was the first of all 
empires, and her Pharaoh a god incarnate, 
before whose golden sandals all the lesser kings 
of the world bowed in the dust “seven times 


THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 17 


and seven times.’ The pioneer of this work, 
surely the most romantic and interesting, as it 
has proved not the least fruitful, in the whole 
realm of scientific research, was the brilliant 
Frenchman, Auguste Mariette. 


CHAPTER II 
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


HE story of the life-work of the man who, 

: more than any other, was responsible for 

the creation of a genuine interest in the 
ereat works of ancient Egypt, as distinguished from 
the aimless or sordid antiquity-grubbing which has 
been described in the preceding chapter, is one of 
the romances of science. Mariette was one of those 
men who, in the words of Cromwell, never go 
so far as when they do not know whither they 
are going, and in his early connection with 
Egypt he was like Saul the son of Kish, who went 
out to look for his father’s asses and found 
a kingdom. Born in 1821, at Boulogne, and 
employed as a teacher in the college of his native 
town, he was drawn to the study of ancient 
Egypt by the fact that the town museum had 
acquired a fine Egyptian sarcophagus from the 
collection of Denon, one of the savants who had 
accompanied Napoleon’s Army of Egypt. 

In 1849 he was appointed assistant in the 
Egyptian Department of the Louvre, and in the 
following year he was sent out to Egypt for 
the purpose of buying Coptic manuscripts. The 
mission, a comparatively trifling one in itself, 

; 18 


‘ 


NOILVYOOUG AO TIVLaAd °€ 


Ul ALES, EKO) SSL MQ, 








MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 1g 


was one of those trifles which often prove turning- 
points in a man’s life; and from the moment 
when he set foot on Egyptian soil, Mariette’s 
future career was marked out for him. 

The thing which determined his fate was a 
passage from the old geographer and historian 
Strabo. The god of Memphis, the most ancient 
capital of Egypt, was Ptah, the artificer-god, who 
was supposed to become incarnate in the sacred 
bull Apis. As each successive Apis died, it 
was buried with all the reverence and splendour 
due to an incarnation of Divinity, in a special 
necropolis at Saqqara. Later in the complicated 
story of Egyptian religion Apis was identified 
with the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and was 
called Osiris-Apis, and the Greeks speedily 
corrupted this into Serapis, and called the 
burial-place of the Apis bulls the Serapeum. 

Now Strabo, in writing his account of Egypt, 
inserted the following passage about this ancient 
bull-cemetery. ‘‘ One finds also [at Memphis] 
a temple of Serapis in a spot so sandy that the 
wind causes the sand to accumulate in heaps, 
under which we could see many sphinxes, some 
of them almost entirely buried, others only 
partially covered ; from which we may conjecture 
that the route leading to this temple might be 
attended with danger if one were surprised by 
a sudden gust of wind.” While Mariette was 
pursuing his inquiries after Coptic manuscripts, 
he noticed in a garden at Alexandria several 
sphinxes, and shortly after, when at Cairo, he 
came across several more of the same type, 
while more still were found at Gizeh. It was 


20 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


plain that there was somewhere not far off some 
storehouse of sphinxes which was being plundered 
to furnish ornaments for the gardens of local 
officials. The matter lay in Mariette’s mind 
until one day when he was at Saqqara he noticed 
the head of a similar sphinx sticking up out of 
the sand. Searching round about it, he found 
a libation-tablet, inscribed with a dedication to 
Osiris-Apis. At once Strabo’s statement occurred 
to his mind, and he realised that he was standing 
over the avenue of sphinxes which the ancient 
writer refers to. 

Coptic manuscripts went to the winds. With- 
out apparently asking permission of anybody, 
“almost furtively,’’ as he says himself, Mariette 
gathered a handful of workmen, and began the 
excavation. ‘‘ The first attempts were hard 
indeed,’ he says; “‘ but before very long lions 
and peacocks, and the Grecian statues of the 
dromos, together with the monumental tablets 
or stele of the temple of Nectanebo, were drawn 
out of the sand, and I was able to announce my 
success to the French Government, informing 
them, at the same time, that the funds placed at 
my disposal for the researches after the manu- 
scripts were entirely exhausted, and that a further 
grant was indispensable. Thus was begun the 
discovery of the Serapeum.” 

The passage is entirely characteristic of 
Mariette, and the calmness with which he 
assumes that the Government which had sent 
him out to buy manuscripts will be quite pleased 
to hear that he has spent all their money on 
something quite different, and has committed 


' 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK _ ar 


them to a huge excavation which was to last four 
years, instead of to the purchase of a few parch- 
ments, is particularly delightful. One wonders 
what were the first thoughts of officialdom at 
Paris when his letter reached the Louvre, and his 
chiefs realised the kind of man and the irre- 
pressible energy which they had let loose in Egypt 
to spend money on things which they had never 
dreamed of. 

His action at the Serapeum was typical of 
his whole career in Egypt. When Mariette had 
once reached the conclusion that a certain object 
was desirable, nothing was allowed to stand in 
the way. He went for his object, one cannot 
always say straight, for he had caution as well as 
daring, and knew how to use the wisdom of the 
serpent, but with a resolute determination which 
seldom failed in the end to accomplish its purpose; 
and if regulations stood in the way, so much the 
worse for the regulations. It was this self- 
reliance and impatience of restraint which were 
responsible for a good deal of the wastefulness 
which undoubtedly was a marked feature of his 
Egyptian work ; but, on the other hand, without 
these same qualities it is dificult to see how his 
work could have been accomplished at all, in the 
face of all the obstacles which were thrown in 
his way by Oriental lethargy and corruption, 
and by European jealousy and selfishness. 

The great Apis-cemetery which was thus dis- 
covered by Mariette’s happy disregard of the 
limits of his commission is all that remains of the 
original Serapeum. When the place was com- 
plete, it comprised an avenue of sphinxes at 


22 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


least 600 feet in length, leading up to the great 
temple of Osiris-Apis. No fewer than 141 of 
the sphinxes were discovered, together with the 
pedestals of others. The temple had entirely 
disappeared, having, no doubt, been used as a 
quarry for other building operations; but an 
inclined passage led from one of its chambers 
downwards into the vast vaults where for 
centuries the bodies of the dead Apis-bulls were 
given burial with splendours which rival those of 
the Pharaohs. 

The vaults belong to three periods. In the 
first, which belongs to the XVIIIth Dynasty, the 
tombs are separate vaults hewn here and there 
in the rock; in the second, which is that of 
Dynasties XXII to XXV, a long gallery was 
excavated, on either side of which mortuary 
chambers were excavated as needed; in the 
third (XXVIth Dynasty) the gallery plan is 
followed, but on a much larger scale. The 
total length of the galleries of the XXVIth 
Dynasty is 1150 feet, and the great gallery alone 
measures 640 feet in length. In the side 
chambers are the immense granite coffins, of 
superb workmanship, which were provided for 
the last resting-place of the Apis. ‘Twenty-four 
of these were found in the third gallery. They 
average 13 feet in length, 11 feet in height, and 
7 feet 8 inches in breadth, and weigh not less 
than 65 tons apiece, magnificent specimens of 
the engineering skill of the ancient workers who 
transported these vast blocks from Aswan to 
Memphis, a distance of almost 600 miles. 

The discovery of the Serapeum set the seal 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 23 


on Mariette’s destiny. Henceforward his life- 
work was to lie in the excavation and preservation 
of the relics of that ancient land to which fate 
had brought him; but as yet he occupied no 
official position in the country, and was, indeed, 
looked upon rather as an unauthorised interloper 
by the native antiquity-hunters and the foreign 
officials who encouraged the constant and shame- 
less pillage which had been going on for half a 
century. It was in his struggles with these 
vampires that the great explorer acquired the 
habits of secret and solitary planning and working 
which characterised his reign as chief of the 
Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and the distrust 
of all other excavators which led him to forbid all 
such work even to the most famous scholars or 
to his dearest friends, and to retain the right to 
excavate exclusively in his own hands to the day 
of his death. 

‘Forced to struggle for more than three 
years,’ says Maspero in his vivid sketch of his 
predecessor, ‘‘ against the jealousy of the dealers 
of the time and the sharp practices of the Egyptian 
officials, he was not long in learning and putting 
into practice all the dodges which the natives 
employed to track out their rivals or to cheat 
the treasury. No one knew better than he how 
to conceal a quest, to pack up the product of it 
in secret, and to dispatch it without arousing the 
suspicion of anyone.” Curious qualifications for 
the head of a great Government department ; 

et they served him well in what was really a 
lifelong battle against the rivalry of men of 
science, who, instead of encouraging him in his 


24 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


efforts to set Egyptology on a firm foundation 
in its native land, did their worst to rob him of 
the fruits of his labours ; and against the apathy 
and indifference of his master, who regarded the 
antiquities which his untiring servant unearthed 
as valuable only because he could gratify a globe- 
trotting potentate by the gift of some of them, 
or in the last resort might raise a loan on the 
precious treasures of his Museum. 

Mariette’s appointment as head of the Service 
of Antiquities was due, indeed, to a piece of 
skilful wire-pulling in which de Lesseps and 
Prince Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III, were 
concerned ; and Said Pasha gave him the post, 
not because he cared for his royal predecessors, 
but because, as Maspero caustically puts it, “ he 
came to the conclusion that he would be more 
acceptable to the Emperor if he made some show 
of taking pity on the Pharaohs.” 

An appointment due to no higher inspiration 
than self-interest on the part of the giver 
obviously depended largely on how long self- 
interest coincided with the interests of the new 
post; and perhaps the most arduous part of 
Mariette’s task consisted in trying to make his 
thoroughly Oriental master see that it was his 
interest to maintain what he had begun, and 
in Overcoming the whims and caprices, and the 
secret intrigues which continually threatened to 
undermine his position and destroy the structure 
which he was so painfully rearing. He never 
could get a permanent grant for the work of his 
department from the Egyptian Government. 
When money was needed he had always to ask 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK ~— 25 


it direct from the Khedive, who granted a subsidy 
or refused it according to the mood in which he 
happened to be at the moment. Again and 
again Mariette had to close down his excavations 
because he had unfortunately approached Said 
when the Khedive was in a bad temper; but 
though the continuance of work under such 
conditions might have driven the most phlegmatic 
of men, let alone a mercurial Frenchman, to 
despair, he never for a moment lost sight of his 
end. Repulsed once, he only waited a more 
favourable opportunity to return to the charge, 
and in the end he was almost invariably successful. 

When his work is criticised, as it has often, 
and not unjustly, been, as hasty and wanting in 
thoroughness, let it be remembered that, with all 
its faults, it was done under conditions which 
would have driven most-men mad, and that 
thoroughness and minute care are not precisely 
the qualities which are encouraged by the 
knowledge that the exchequer is empty, and that 
there is no prospect of being able to pay the 
workmen unless one can catch a wayward prince 
in a favourable mood. All things considered, 
the wonder is, not that so much was overlooked 
and left undone, but that so much was actually 
accomplished under such maddening conditions. 

His main object was to form such a Museum 
in Egypt that it would no longer be possible for 
the representatives of the European powers to 
excuse their spoliation by the suggestion that 
Egypt was unable to safeguard her own treasures 
of antiquity. With this end in view he was 
indefatigable in the work of excavation, doing 


26 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


his utmost to gather from Memphis, Thebes, 
Abydos, ‘Tanis, and other famous sites, such a 
collection of historical monuments as_ should 
render the creation of a permanent home for 
them a crying necessity. 

Erelong he had so far succeeded that his 
collection included fine statues of Ramses I], 
the well-known Amenartas, the so-called Hyksos 
Sphinxes, the Triumphal Stele of Thothmes ITI, 
and a great mass of amulets from the cemeteries 
of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. ‘To house 
these treasures he was provided with a set of 
miserable buildings which were of no use for 
any other purpose—a deserted mosque which 
was falling into ruin, some filthy sheds, and a 
dwelling-house alive with vermin, in which he 
lived himself. Making the most of this heap of 
ruins, he improvised pedestals for the statues 
and cases for the amulets, and turned his early . 
training as a drawing-master to account in the 
painting of the decorations of his crazy walls. 

The incident which finally determined Said 
to yield to the importunity of his energetic 
Director of Antiquities was highly characteristic, 
both of the daring and persistence of Mariette, 
and the waywardness of the ruler with whom he 
had to deal. One of the chief hindrances to 
the erection of the Museum was the fact that the 
excavations, though highly productive of objects 
of historic interest, had as yet yielded nothing 
in the way of gold or jewellery, and Said, a 
thorough Oriental, cared but little for researches 
which only produced inscribed or sculptured 
stones. Early in 1859, Mariette’s workmen at 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 27 


Drah-Abou’l-Neggah, near Thebes, discovered 
the splendid gilded sarcophagus of the Queen 
Aahhotep. Mariette sent orders for it to be 
sent to Cairo at once; but meanwhile the Mudir 
of Keneh had laid hands on it, opened it in his 
harem, and, throwing aside the mummy, took 
possession of the fine set of jewellery which the 
coffin contained, and hurried off by boat to 
present it to the Khedive as an offering from 
himself. 

Mariette immediately set out on his steam- 
boat, the Samanoud, to meet the robber. Board- 
ing the Mudir’s boat, he tried to persuade him to 
give up his ill-gotten goods, and when persuasion 
failed he passed to threats, and from threats to 
blows. Finally he triumphed, and took posses- 
sion of the treasure. Knowing the danger which 
he ran of having his action represented to the 
Khedive as sheer robbery of a treasure addressed 
to the Royal Palace, Mariette took care to be the 
first to tell the story to his royal master, and 
did so with such effect that the Khedive 
thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and laughed heartily 
at the spoiling of the spoiler. He kept a gold 
chain for one of his wives, and himself wore for 
awhile a fine scarab which he afterwards returned ; 
but the rest of the treasure was reserved, as 
Mariette wished, for his darling Museum, and 
the Khedive, now convinced that the collection 
was worth housing, gave orders for the erection 
of a suitable building at Boulak. 

Thus, by a happy combination of good fortune 
and daring, the great explorer succeeded in the 
attainment of at least a part of his heart’s desire. 


28 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


The buildings at Boulak, however, were far from 
satisfactory, and his heart was always set on a 
dream-museum, which he did not live to realise, 
which indeed has not yet been realised, though 
the great Egyptian Museum has known two 
changes of abode since his time, and is now 
preparing for a fresh extension to house the 
treasures of T'utankhamen’s tomb. In addition, 
he had to be continually on his guard to see that 
the priceless things which he had gathered with 
such pains, and housed at such risk, were not 
dissipated to gratify his patron’s passing whims 
of generosity towards some favourite guests, or 
sold en masse to act as security for a loan. 
Mariette had no intention of allowing his treasures 
to be treated as pawnbroker’s pledges; but it 
took all his energy and authority to prevent this 
happening, for whenever Said was short of money, 
which happened with unfailing regularity, his 
first thought was to raise a loan on the Museum, 
and it was only the Director’s personal accepta- 
bility with his master which enabled him to stave 
off disaster once and again. 

The narrowest escape came just on the heels 
of what had seemed the greatest triumph of his 
life. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he had 
secured the first adequate representation of 
Egyptian antiquities. A small Egyptian temple 
was built, preceded by a short avenue of sphinxes ; 
and within the temple were housed the finest 
specimens of art and craftsmanship which Egypt 
could produce. For six months all the world 
admired and wondered; then came the blow. 
Mariette had wrought too well, and made his 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 29 


treasures look too inviting. The Empress 
Eugenie had cast covetous eyes upon them, and 
the Khedive Ismail was informed that she 
desired to have the whole collection offered to 
her as a gift. Ismail, taken by surprise, and, as 
usual, short of cash, did not dare to refuse ; but 
he had the sense to make his consent subject to 
one condition. ‘‘ There is,” he said to the 
emissary of the Empress, “‘ someone at Boulak 
more powerful than I, and you must address 
yourself to him.” It must have been the cruellest 
of blows to Mariette thus to be wounded in the 
house of his friends; but his resolution was 
proof against both imperial wiles and threats, 
and the collection returned in safety to its native 
home. The explorer had saved the treasures of 
the land of his adoption from the greed of his 
native land; but it was at a heavy cost that the 
victory was gained. The favour of France, 
which had always been one of his main supports, 
was immediately withdrawn, and for the next two 
or three years Mariette found himself in disgrace 
at the palace, and unable to obtain any support 
for his schemes. Curiously enough, it was the 
downfall of France in 1870 which brought him 
into favour once more with the Khedive, and for 
the last ten years of his life he saw the work to 
which he had given himself steadily growing, 
though on at least one occasion the proposal to 
raise a loan on the Museum was revived, and 
though Ismail’s grandiose plans for the extension 
of the buildings remained only dreams, which 
came through the ivory gate. 

In respect to the excavations which he kept so 


ell 


30 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


jealously in his own hands, Mariette’s energy 
was amazing, though its results were never so 
carefully chronicled as they might have been, 


. and were sometimes scarcely chronicled at all. 


The two greatest charges to be brought against 
him as an excavator are, first, this lack of adequate 
publication of his results, a huge mass of precious 
material being gathered without anything to tell 
the student its actual provenance, or its historical 
connection, and, second, the craving for big 
and imposing results, which led him often to 
neglect the smaller but often more important 
material which would have been of priceless 
value to modern workers, but did not appeal to 
him, and consequently got overlooked and lost. 

With regard to the latter point, however, 
we must remember that the knowledge of the 
infinite importance of the small game of the 
archeologist is a thing of modern growth, and that 
it is scarcely fair to blame Mariette for not being 
a quarter of a century in advance of his time; 
and also that the difficulties of his position obliged 
him to lay stress on the big and imposing monu- 
ment, even at the cost of neglecting what was 
really of more value to the serious student. 
Broken potsherds may mean far more for the 
reconstruction of history than intact colossi ; 
but to the men in authority on whom depended 
the continuance of the excavator’s work, they 
were just-broken potsherds. 

Spite of all the defects of his methods, we 
owe him an infinite debt, both for what he 
accomplished and for what he hindered others 
from destroying. The chief fruit of his toil, 


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MARIETTE AND HIS WORK © 31 


apart from the work at the Serapeum and in the 
necropolis at Saqqara, was the unveiling at 
Abydos of the noble temple of Sety I, with its 
exquisite reliefs, which will always rank among 
the very finest work of the artists of the New 
Empire. Besides the excavation of the temple, 
he did an immense amount of work, very imper- 
fectly recorded, alas, in the great necropolis of 
Abydos, where he unearthed over 15,000 monu- 
ments of one kind or another. It ought not to 
be forgotten either, though it often has been, 
_ and though it has been stated that in his work 
at Abydos he had no idea of the existence there 
of any remains of the early dynasties, that it was 
Mariette who prophesied both the discovery of 
Ist Dynasty tombs and that of the great 
subterranean ‘“‘ Pool of Osiris,’ which is the 
latest fruit of M. Naville’s work there. 

Scarcely less important was his work at 
Thebes, where he for the first time made some 
approach to establishing the architectural history 
of the great temple of Karnak from its foundation 
under the Middle Kingdom down to the close 
of building under the Ptolemies. ‘To him, also, 
we owe the excavation of the great temple of 
Ramses III at Medinet Habu, and the first 
beginnings of that huge piece of work which 
M. Naville and his assistants at Der el-Bahri 
only completed, after thirteen years’ hard labour, 
in 1908. 

How many of the visitors to Hatshepsut’s 
beautiful memorial temple, who wonder at the 
patience which unearthed this most exquisite of 
Egyptian buildings, remember that it was Mariette 


32 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


who first gave to the world the most interesting 
part of the whole building with its reliefs of 
the royal expedition to the Land of Punt? 
‘To tell of all his work at the thirty-seven 
places in which he excavated would take a 
volume, and not a chapter. One of his greatest 
successes, though it dealt only with a Ptolemaic 
building, was the excavation of the very perfect 
temple of Edfu. He found it so completely 
covered with rubbish that an Arab village had 
established itself upon the roof of the ancient 
sanctuary of Horus. Mariette succeeded in 
getting these interlopers cleared away, and was 
at last able to reveal the whole of a building, 
which, while comparatively modern as Egyptian 
temples go, is yet one of the most complete and 
perfect specimens of Egyptian architecture, show- 
ing the almost pure type of temple architecture 
as it can be seen only in one or two other instances 
in the whole land. 

The great explorer’s work in Egypt lasted for 
almost exactly thirty years. Before his death on 
January 18, 1881, he had the satisfaction of know- 
ing that the work of which he had so well laid 
the foundations would not be interrupted when 
he had to lay it down. He never, indeed, saw 
the accomplishment of his great life-dream, the 
completion of a Museum really worthy of the 
treasures which he had gathered. Sir Gaston 
Maspero, his able successor, has told us how 
that vision hovered round his death-bed, and 
cheered his last hours; but even to-day the 
great Museum at Cairo is scarcely worthy of 
the matchless stores which it holds, and it is 


MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 33 


becoming more and more doubtful whether 
Cairo is the right place for a collection of such 
priceless value. But at least Mariette accom- 
plished one thing which will never be undone ; he 
put a stop to the worst of the pillage of Egyptian 
antiquities which had gone on unchecked for 
half a century, and he established the fact that 
the proper place where the historical monuments 
of a great nation’s past should be gathered is on 
national soil, where they are at home, and where 
they have a value which could never be theirs 
if they were scattered through a score of alien 
collections. 

A noble statue keeps his memory alive in the 
Cairo Museum. Maspero tells us that a great 
personage who visited the Museum asked whether 
this monument was that of a Pharaoh or of a 
modern individual ; and when he was told that 
it was the monument of Mariette, the founder of 
the Museum, ‘* Mariette,” said he, “I did not 
know that the founder of the Museum was a 
woman!” Such is fame, even in the land 
where memories seem to endure longer than 
in any other spot on earth. But Mariette’s 
worth to the world does not depend on monu- 
ments, though he had so much to do with them, 
nor on great personages, though he suffered so 
much at their hands all his life. It lies in this, 
that he saved the relics of ancient Egyptian 
history from the bottomless bog of international 
jealousies and greed and insisted that a nation 
with a great past had the right and the responsi- 
bility to hold the treasures of that past within its 
own bounds—in trust for the world. 

CG 


34 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 


“* Assuredly,’’ says Maspero, “ Mariette is not 
a model to be blindly imitated ; and the man who 
should imitate him to-day would run the risk of 
committing irreparable blunders ; but let anyone 
_ who is tempted to depreciate him replace himself 
in spirit in the Egypt of sixty years ago, and let 
him ask himself how he would have acted in the 
midst of the difficulties which would then have 
assailed him on all sides; I believe that, if he is 
an honest man, he will be forced to admit that 
though perhaps he would have handled matters 
differently, he would not have come better out 
of the business. Mariette was the man who 
fitted the time.” 


CHAPTER III 


THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN PERIOD 


the close of the old and bad period of 

reckless pillage in Egypt. His thirty 
years of ceaseless struggle against difficulties 
formed the transition period, in which the 
foundations of the modern science of Egyptology 
were being laid, but in which its aims and methods 
were as yet but partially and imperfectly under- 
stood. With his death in 1881, and the beginning 
of the reign of his successor, the late Sir Gaston 
Maspero, we may fairly be said to reach the 
dawn of the modern period, in which new men 
and new methods have completely revolutionised 
the whole conception of archeology, and made it 
one of the most fruitful aids to the reconstruction 
and the comprehension of ancient history, and 
above all the indispensable interpreter of the 
life of ancient peoples. It seems fitting, there- 
fore, that at this point we should stop for a little 
to consider what archeology is, and what are its 
aims, its methods, and its materials; for with 
regard to all these points there is, save in the case 
of those who are more or less students of the 
past, a very general haziness in the public mind. 

35 


ie coming of Mariette in 1850 marked 


36 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


To the average man, archeology might be 
quite satisfactorily defined as the study of old 
stones and old bones, potsherds, and fragments 
of corroded metal—a study presupposing, on 
the part of the student, a curious and perverted 
taste for the dry and the dusty and a disregard 
for all the things which have in them the true 
sap and joy of life. “‘ Your true antiquarian,” 
it has been said, “ loveth a thing the better for 
that it is rotten and stinketh”’; and this judg- 
ment, more pointed than polite, fairly represents 
the conception which most people cherish of the 
work of the excavator and the interpreter of his 
results. 

Now and again this crude and summary 
judgment is shaken for a little by some wonderful 
discovery which seems to hint that there is more 
in archeology than the man in the street had 
thought. Some Pharaoh, like ‘Tutankhamen, is 
found “lying in glory, in his own house,” as 
Isaiah puts it, and the world in general begins 
to turn in its sleep and dream for a while of the 
romance of buried treasure. It may be suspected 
that no small part of the interest awakened with 
regard to Tutankhamen’s tomb arose from the 
fact that there was talk of the money value of the 
find running into millions sterling. A science 
which can produce assets like that must be worth 
attention. To tell anyone whose interest has 
thus been excited that the money value of the 
find, even if it has not been ridiculously over- 
estimated, as is most likely the case, is the least 
important aspect of it, absolutely negligible in 
comparison with its other values, is merely to 


BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 37 


invite incredulity, polite or otherwise. In any 
case the temporary interest of the find soon dies 
away, and the public reverts to its old and normal 
conception of the archzologist as an amiable and 
quite harmless lunatic, and of his study as the 
dullest and dustiest thing under heaven. 

All this, of course, is just about as wrong, 
and as stupidly wrong, as anything well can be. 
It is, indeed, exactly the opposite of the truth. 

he explorer, instead of being inspired with a 
malignant disregard for the sap and joy of life, 
is really so enamoured of these very things that 
one of his main objects is to endeavour to make 
the world realise them not only in the present, 
but for the past also. His purpose, and his 
business, if he has any real understanding of 
the end for which Providence created him (for 
there are some archzologists who have not, and 
who almost justify the worst that the public 
can believe of their science), is not the mere 
gathering of facts, but the reconstruction by 
means of these of the life of the past, for the 
interest, the help, and the guidance of the 
present. His work is not complete until he has 
presented a picture of that ancient world in 
which he is interested, not as it is now, a handful 
of unrelated fragments of dry bone and dusty 
papyrus and mouldering metal, but as it was 
when the dry bones were alive, clothed with 
flesh and inspired with spirit, when the words 
on the scroll throbbed with the hopes and fears 
of a living man or woman, and the corroded 
bronze or iron was a sword in the hand of a 
mighty man of valour, or a chisel in that of a 


38 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


cunning sculptor. Unless he keeps this in view 
as his real object, he is misconceiving his whole 
purpose, and substituting means for ends ; unless 
he can to some extent accomplish this (no man, 
of course, can do it completely) he is failing of 
his aim. 

But we are still waiting for our definition of 
what archeology is, and what are the ways in 
which it is to accomplish this desirable revivifying 
of the past. It has been defined by a well-known 
excavator and writer as “‘ the study of the facts 
of ancient history and ancient lore ’—which is 
very well as far as it goes, but omits, strangely 
enough, the very point in which its author has 
shown himself most keenly interested. ‘To com- 
plete the definition, one would need to add, 
‘* and of ancient life in all aspects.” 

The archeologist deals with ancient history, 
and may prove helpful to the historian of the 
past in many ways; he deals with ancient lore, 
and may reveal material which is of the utmost 
importance for the study of the knowledge and 
literature of the past; but his main concern is 
always with the life of the past, and his main 
use to the world is to enable the present to see 
and to realise the life of the past as it really was, 
to give life again to the men of old so that they 
shall no longer be names in a dry text-book, but 
flesh-and-blood figures, and to do this for the 
common man of the past as well as for his rulers, 
so that ancient history shall no longer be the 
chronicle of the deeds, great or otherwise, of 
Pharaohs and monarchs of all sorts, but shall 
give you the whole many-coloured tapestry of 


BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 39 


life as it was in those far-off days with the fates 
of common men interwoven with the glittering 
destinies of their lords and masters. 

‘“* Archeological research,” says Dr. R. A. S. 
Macalister in the latest summary of its results, 
“consists principally in the discovery and the 
classification of the common things of daily life, 
houses, personal ornaments, domestic utensils, 
tools, weapons, and the like.’ To have said 
such a thing fifty years ago would have been to 
make the scientific man of those days hold up 
his hands in horror at such a degradation of 
a science whose chief end was the discovery of 
the great monuments of great men, and the 
substantiation or correction of history by their 
means. 

To put the change of view in a word, 
archeology has during the modern period become 
human. It has learned that history never existed, 
and cannot be viewed, in a vacuum; and that 
quite as important for its right apprehension of 
the facts is the realisation of the medium in 
which the facts transpired, and which largely 
conditioned them. “The true function of 
archeological research,” says Dr. Macalister 
again, ‘‘ is to discover the conditions amid which 
lived such heroes of old as we have mentioned ; 
to show them, no longer as solitary, more or less 
idealised or superhuman, figures, but as men of 
like passions to ourselves moving with other 
men, in a busy world engrossed in its secular 
interests, and making daily use of the common 
things of life.’ ‘To take an illustration from a 
familiar figure of Egyptian history, we know, as 


40 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


a fact of history, that the favourite son of the 
mighty Ramses II was Setna-Khaemuast, that he 
fought in his father’s Syrian wars, that about 
_ the middle of the reign he was high-priest of 
Memphis, and that he died somewhere before 
the fifty-fifth year of Ramses ; in other words, 
so far as the big records of the historical monu- 
ments go, he is to us “ magni nominis umbra,”’ 
and no more. The real living interest of the 
man begins for us with the discovery of a papyrus 
of the Ptolemaic period, now in the Cairo 
Museum, which shows him studying the old 
inscriptions at Memphis in search of magic 
charms, stealing the roll of Thoth from the tomb 
of an earlier prince, just like a modern explorer, 
and getting into trouble over the theft. 

“The lofty personages,” says Maspero in 
the Introduction to his charming Contes 
Populaires, “The lofty personages whose 
mummies repose in our museums had a reputa- 
tion for gravity so thoroughly established, that 
nobody suspected them of having ever diverted 
themselves with such futilities in those days 
when they were only mummies in expectation.” 
That is just the point. It is not the impassive 
mummies, with their reputation for gravity, 
thoroughly well-deserved for the last three 
thousand years, since they became mummies, 
that we want to know; it is the folk who were 
only “ mummies in expectation,’”’ who lived and 
loved, hated and fought, and made fools of 
themselves, like other people. And the business 
of archeology is to show you these people, in 
their habit as they lived, and in the ordinary 





pele Pils ORE DEUs-THEhY PYLON, AND VIEW FROM. THE. BYLON: 


’ 


Dart ie 
} ae hea 

aed > re 
aaa | dg, _ 





BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 41 


medium which conditioned their actions. If it 
cannot or does not do that, then it deserves all 
the vivid abuse which Carlyle used to hurl at 
the Dry-as-dusts of the past. 

Now it is the supreme merit of the modern 
period that it has been steadily learning the 
importance of this aspect of its work among the 
treasures of the past, till now it can say “‘ nothing 
human is foreign to me.” ‘The change of view 
is set before us very plainly in the contrast 
between our modern histories of Egypt and those 
of our forefathers. 

Take, for instance, Maspero’s Histoire 
Ancienne, or Breasted’s History of Egypt, 
and compare the brilliant pictures of ancient 
Egyptian life which you will find in their pages 
with the dry summaries of events which passed 
for Egyptian history fifty years ago. What 
has made the difference? Simply the fact that 
in the interval the archzologist has been learning 
that his business is not only or even chiefly with 
the great historical monuments of the land with 
which he is dealing, but, above all, with the small 
things which made the background of lKfe, 
“the pots and pans,” as Dr. Macalister puts it, 
*“ which are essential if he is to fill in the picture 
of the ancient life of the region.” 

The change of view thus brought about is 
marked by a corresponding change of judgment 
as to what shall constitute the chief object of 
search in the excavations which reveal the past 
to us. In the dawn of excavation it was the big 
and imposing monument which was eagerly and 
almost exclusively sought for—very naturally, 


42 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


for it was only by the discovery of such relics 
that the explorer could hope, in the existing state 
of knowledge, to justify his work, and to create 
_the interest on the part of the public which would 
provide him with the funds which were needed 
for its prosecution. Colossal statues, granite 
sarcophaguses, intact burials in Egypt, winged 
human-headed bulls, alabaster slabs carved in 
relief, cuneiform tablets inscribed with legends 
of the Creation and the Flood in Mesopotamia ; 
such were the prizes which rewarded and vindi- 
cated the labours of men like Mariette, Botta, 
and Layard in the middle of last century. It was 
all very natural and inevitable, as things then 
were ; and it is both unjust and unreasonable 
to denounce the work of such pioneers because 
they worked with the knowledge and under the 
conditions of their own time. 

_ The science of excavation and the knowledge 
of its true objects did not exist when they did 
their work; it had to be slowly and painfully 
created by experience, and in the process it was 
inevitable that many things should suffer and 
that there should be much loss of material which 
a better instructed generation would have known 
how to value. These great men would doubtless 
do their work very differently now; but it is 
vain to criticise them for not possessing a know- 
ledge which nobody possessed in their day. We 
owe them rather our gratitude for that they 
accomplished so much in such unfavourable 
circumstances. 

There can be no doubt, nevertheless, that the 
methods of the early excavators, judged from 


BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 43 


the modern point of view, were wasteful to a 
large degree of the things which we have learned 
to consider of supreme importance in the study 
of the past. In their search for the big game 
of excavation they overlooked, too often with 
fatal loss to the science of the future, the common 
things which would have made the indispensable 
background to their more imposing discoveries, 
and in many instances what they let slip will 
never be recovered. ‘To-day the outlook is 
entirely changed, and the man who should 
excavate on the lines of Mariette or Layard would 
be a hopeless anachronism among explorers. 
The excavator goes to his work now, not with 
the hope of finding some great monument which 
will confirm some doubtful statement of history 
or disprove some theory of succession, not even 
with the hope of discovering some store of 
tablets which will let new light in on a dark 
period. Such things may of course be found, 
and are welcomed when they are found; and 
such discoveries as that of the tomb of Tutan- 
khamen tell us that the romance of exploration is 
by no means a thing of the past. But the modern 
explorer has learned the infinite importance of 
little things, and the results for which he mainly 
hopes are such things as would be heartily 
despised by the casual and uninstructed beholder. 
Perhaps the change may be expressed most 
simply by saying that while the explorer of two 
generations back looked for colossi, his present- 
day successor looks for crockery. 

It may seem that from a science thus occupied 
and concerned mainly with the infinitely little, 


44 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


the romance of the early days of exploration has 
departed ; but this is to misunderstand the situa- 
tion. The explorer’s work was never romantic 
in the sense in which the average man understands 
the word. The idea of the excavator as a man 
who spends his days in exploring wonderful 
underground chambers filled with the treasures 
of the past, is just about as true as the picture of 
the great detective who is always unravelling the 
mysteries of crime by the most amazing strokes 
of genius, and landing himself incidentally in 
the most appalling situations. ‘There never was 
such an explorer, or such a detective; and the 
life of the one as of the other is mainly one of 
monotonous drudgery at which most of the folk 
who talk about romance would shudder. The 
great thrilling moments, when a discovery which 
will excite the imagination of the world is made, 
have always been far between, and the finding of 
Tutankhamen’s tomb has shown that they may 
still come to the modern explorer just as richly 
as to his predecessor. But the true romance of 
modern excavation lies in this, not that it can 
reveal the dead monarchs of thirty centuries 
back in all their splendour, but that by its patient 
piecing together of innumerable small details 
it can give back to us the actual life of the period 
in which the dead monarch lived, and let us see 
the order of his court, and what is far more 
important to our knowledge of the past, the 
trafhe of the market-place in his cities, and the 
intercourse of his land with the nations around 
it. It is scarcely too much to say that because 
of the minute care with which the modern 


BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 45 


excavator has treated the minutest fragments of 
the relics of ancient days we are better acquainted 
with the life of the Egypt of the New Empire 
than we are with that of the ordinary European 
nation of the Dark Ages, though the latter be 
more than two millenniums nearer us in time. 
A science which can accomplish such a miracle 
of resurrection can never lack the element of 
true romance in the eyes of anyone who has a 
real sense of the wonder of life. 

It follows from the fact that the modern 
excavator is called to deal with such a multitude 
of matters, each in itself perhaps comparatively 
insignificant, but each of importance, as an 
additional stroke in the picture of the past which 
is being slowly built up on the canvas, that far 
more extensive qualifications are exacted of him 
than sufficed for his predecessor. ‘‘ Our explorer 
in Egypt,” says Miss Amelia Edwards, “ is only 
called upon to be an ‘all-round’ archeologist 
within the field of the national history : namely, 
from the time of Mena, the prototype of Egyptian 
royalty, who probably reigned about five thousand 
years before Christ, down to the time of the 
Emperor Theodosius, Anno Domini 379. Yet 
even within that limit, he has to know about a 
vast number of things. He must be familiar 
with all the styles and periods of Egyptian 
architecture, sculpture and decoration; with 
the forms, patterns and glazes of Egyptian 
pottery ; with the distinctive characteristics of 
the mummy-cases, sarcophagi, methods of em- 
balmment and styles of bandaging peculiar to 
interments of various epochs; and with all 


46 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 


phases of the art of writing, hieroglyphic, hieratic, 
and demotic. Nor is this all. He must know 
by the measurement of a mud brick, by the 
colour of a glass bead, by the modelling of a 
porcelain statuette, by the pattern of an ear- 
ring, to what period each should be assigned. 
He must be conversant with all the types of all 
the gods; and last, not least, he must be able 
to recognise a forgery at first sight. After this, 
it must, I think, be admitted that the explorer, like 
the poet, is ‘born, not made’! The wonder 
perhaps is that he should ever be born at all.” 

It seems, no doubt, a sufficiently formidable 
catalogue of qualifications ; but to Miss Edwards’ 
list others would now have to be added. For 
the progress of investigation of the inter-relation 
of the nations of the ancient east has broken down 
the limitation which she imposed upon the 
knowledge of her imaginary explorer, and the 
Egyptian excavator of the present day must be 
familiar, not only with all that has been men- 
tioned, but with the related work of Mesopotamia 
and Babylonia, with the art of the brilliant 
Minoan craftsman, with all that is known of the 
enigmatic Hittite civilisation, and with the art, 
both archaic and mature, of Greece, together 
with a score of other related matters ! 

All this development of a science which has 
grown almost within the lifetime of some of its 
exponents from a comparatively simple thing to 
one of the most complex and exacting of human 
studies, has, of course, been the work of many 
minds and hands. But if the name of any one 
man must be associated with modern excavation 


BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 47 


as that of the chief begetter of its principles and 
methods, it must be the name of Professor Sir 
W. M. Flinders Petrie. It was he, as one of 
the most brilliant of the exponents of his methods 
has recently stated, who first called the attention 
of modern excavators to the importance of 
‘* unconsidered trifles,’’ as means for the recon- 
struction of the past. Above all, it was he who 
first taught us that for purposes of certainty in 
the establishment of the succession of different 
periods, the “ broken earthenware ” of a people 
may be of far greater value than its most gigantic 
monuments. And it has been men trained in 
the principles which he established who have 
during the last generation been doing the work 
which has made the past of the Classic East 
a living thing to the world of to-day. It remains 
now to trace the outline of their accomplishment 


in Egypt. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


F all the works of man there is none 
() which has attained such lasting and 
universal fame as the group of build- 

ings known as the Pyramids of Gizeh. For the 
best part of five thousand years this group of 
mighty structures has been one of the wonders 
of the world, and the theories which have been 
framed to account for their existence have been 
more numerous than the Pyramids themselves. 
Egypt has many buildings far more beautiful, 
and perhaps as wonderful; but the Pyramids 
are, to the great majority of people, the character- 
istic buildings of the land, and whenever Egypt 
is named there rises before the mind at once a 
vision of three vast bulks of masonry squatting 
defiantly on the rising ground above the Libyan 
desert, as though challenging ‘Time himself to 
make any impression on their stupendous mass. 
“All things dread Time,” it has been said, 
‘but Time itself dreads the Pyramids’; and 
the very exaggeration testifies to the profound 
impression which their bulk and strength have 
made upon the mind of man. The mere lapse 
of forty-five centuries would seemingly of itself 

48 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 49 


have made next to no impression on them; the 
vandalism of man has done a little more; but 
even the efforts of those who for many centuries 
have used the vast masses as a convenient quarry 
have done little more than show more con- 
vincingly the power and skill of the builders 
who reared in the beginning these huge 
mausoleums around whose bases the workers 
of succeeding generations have pottered and 
scratched like children playing with toy spades 
in the sand. 

Yet though the Pyramids may fairly claim to 
be the most famous and the best-known buildings 
in the world, the ignorance in the average mind 
with regard to them and the purpose for which 
they were reared is still just about as general and 
widespread as the fame of them ; and the purpose 
of this chapter is, first, to tell what, and how many, 
and of what kind they are; next, what was the 
end for which they were reared in the beginning 
of history ; and lastly, to recount something of 
the efforts which have taught us what is really 
known about them. 

To most people the Pyramids mean solely 
the great group at Gizeh ; but though these are 
by far the greatest and the most famous, they are 
by no means the only pyramids, nor are they 
even the oldest. The chief field, known as the 
Great Pyramid Field, begins almost opposite 
Cairo, on the western side of the Nile, at Abu 
Roash, where is the pyramid of Dadefra (Razedef) 
of the IVth Dynasty, and extends south along 
the bank of the Nile for a distance of about 
sixty miles to the Fayum, where lie the pyramids 

D 


so PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


of the great XIIth Dynasty Pharaohs, the last 
of the regular kings of Egypt to build pyramids 
for themselves. Far to the south again in the 
country which we know as the Soudan, there 
lie two other pyramid fields, the one at Gebel 
Barkal or Napata, near to the Fourth Cataract, 
the other at Begarawiyah, the ancient Meroé, 
between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and a 
little more than a hundred miles north of 
Khartoum. These two fields have neither the 
greatness of scale nor the historic importance 
and interest of the Great Pyramid Field, for 
they belong to the Ethiopian kings, some of 
whom, for a time, reigned over Egypt in the days 
of its decline. The Napata group belongs to 
the earlier Ethiopian monarchs, who founded 
the XXVth Egyptian Dynasty, which was finally 
driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians in the 
reign of ‘lanutamen, and to their successors, 
who after the disasters of 661 B.c. maintained 
the old Ethiopian sovereignty in the south; the 
Meroé group belongs to the later Ethiopian kings 
who reigned after 300 B.c. As things go in 
Egypt, therefore, these southern pyramids are 
quite modern, nor do they belong to the most 
interesting period of Egyptian history, and though 
they have been long known, they are only now 
in process of being investigated by the Harvard- 
Boston Expedition under G. A. Reisner, whose 
work at Begarawiyah is still unfinished. Our 
attention, therefore, may be given solely to the 
Great Pyramid Field. | 
Beginning with Abu Roash, the next site of 
importance is Gizeh itself, with all its wonders 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 51 


of IVth Dynasty work. Passing southwards, 
we come to Abusir, with its remains of the 
pyramids and temples of the Sun-worshipping 
Pharaohs of the Vth Dynasty, lately excavated by 
the German expedition; beyond these again 
comes the great field of Saqqara, with remains 
dating over a long period of Egyptian history. 
The Step-Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd 
Dynasty is, of course, the most important and 
imposing monument; but besides, there are 
pyramids dating from the latter part of the Vth 
Dynasty, a number of VIth Dynasty ones, and 
the splendid tombs of many of the nobles of the 
early dynastic period, so that, though the Saqqara 
portion of the field cannot compare with Gizeh 
in the size of its monuments, it is only second 
to its northern rival, and surpasses it in the 
variety and the pictorial interest of its minor 
tombs. Still travelling southwards, we pass in 
succession Dahshur and Lisht with their pyramids 
of the great Pharaohs of the XIIth Dynasty, 
Medum, with its remarkable pyramid of King 
Seneferu of the [IIrd Dynasty, rising in three 
stages, like a Mesopotamian Ziggurat, to a height 
of 114 feet, and Illahun, where Senusert II had 
his pyramid, and where the exquisite jewellery 
of some of the royal princesses was found recently, 
and reach the last of the series at Hawara, where 
Amenemhat III, one of the greatest and noblest 
of the long line of Egyptian Pharaohs, had his 
last resting-place. In later days there were 
pyramid tombs at Thebes and Abydos ; but the 
pyramid part of these structures was com- 
paratively unimportant, and they have, in any 


52 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


case, left few traces behind. Indeed, after the 
XIIth Dynasty the fashion of pyramid-burial 
seems to have gradually died out, though we 
know from the revelations of the Abbott Papyrus 
that in the XXth Dynasty there were in the 
Theban necropolis at least ten royal pyramids 
belonging to kings of the XIIIth to the XVIIIth 
Dynasty. Altogether there must be at present in 
Egypt something like seventy pyramids of greater 
or less importance, without reckoning the later 
and less important groups of Napata and Meroé. 

Passing by the Abu Roash pyramid of King 
Razedef, we begin our survey with the magnifi- 
cent group of Gizeh, which to the ordinary man 
are the Pyramids to the exclusion of all others. 
Everyone knows, of course, what the Pyramids 
are like, and has some rough idea of their sur- 
passing size, and perhaps the only way to impress 
the sense of their vastness on the mind is to use 
one or other of the comparisons which have 
been worked out to illustrate the stupendous 
scale on which they are built. To tell the 
reader that the weight of the stones built into 
the Great Pyramid is over six million tons is 
merely to bewilder him; the vastness of the 
business may be better appreciated when one 
realises that a town of the size of Aberdeen might 
be built out of the materials which Khufu 
gathered together for his monstrous tomb, or 
that if the stones were divided into blocks a 
foot square, and these blocks placed end to end 
in a straight line, the line would be long enough 
to reach two-thirds of the length of the circum- 
ference of the earth at the Equator. 


‘XNIHdS AHL AO WIMdNAL AO LYVd HLIM ‘XNIHdS GNV CINVUAd LVAD ‘9 








PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 53 


Khufu’s pyramid was originally about 481 
feet in height, and each of its sides measured 
at the base a matter of 755 feet 8 inches, and these 
long lines were laid out and built with such 
wonderful accuracy that the maximum error is 
not more than an inch. “ The laying out of the 
base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu,’’ says 
Professor Sir W. M. F. Petrie, “is a triumph of 
skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, 
could be covered by placing one’s thumb on 
them ; and to lay out a square of more than a 
furlong in the side (and with rock in the midst 
of it, which prevented any diagonal checks 
being measured) with such accuracy shows 
surprising care. The work of the casing stones 
which remain is of the same class; the faces are 
so straight and so truly square, that when the 
stones were built together the film of mortar 
left between them is on an average not thicker 
than one’s thumb-nail, though the joint is a 
couple of yards long; and the levelling of them 
over long distances has not any larger errors.” 
“Equal to optician’s work of the present day,”’ 
says the same authority elsewhere, “‘ but on a 
scale of acres instead of feet or yards of material.” 

The Second Pyramid is slightly inferior to 
the first in size, its measurements being 472 feet 
in height and 706 feet 3 inches on each side; 
and its workmanship is also of inferior accuracy, 
the errors in length being double, and those of 
angle quadruple those of its predecessor, while 
the masonry is of poorer quality. Curiously 
enough, the sarcophagus, the core of the whole 
vast building, was in the case of the Great 


54 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


Pyramid one of the poorest pieces of work of 
its kind in the period, and much inferior to that 
of Khafra in the Second Pyramid. Spite of 
its smaller size, which most travellers scarcely 
notice owing to the fact of its somewhat superior 
position, and its inferior workmanship, the 
Second Pyramid is itself a world’s wonder. 

Beside these great twin brethren, Men- 
kaura’s Third Pyramid, with its 215 feet of 
height and its length on the side of 346 feet 
2, inches, seems diminutive, though its partial 
outer casing of granite may have given it a 
richness of appearance which to some extent 
compensated for its smallness. 

Here, then, we have a group of buildings 
which, from whatever point of view they are 
regarded, are among the most wonderful ever 
reared by the hand of man, and which in sheer 
bulk are by far the greatest of all architectural 
works. What was the purpose for which these 
stupendous bulks were built and maintained for 
so long? ‘To ask such a question was, not so 
long ago, to let loose all the flood of vain imagina- 
tions which always gathers about a subject which 
is great and imperfectly understood. 

The theories which have been framed about 
the Great Pyramid in particular are almost as 
monstrous as itself, but have none of its solidity. 
Of these, perhaps the favourite, because of a 
certain romance attaching to it, and because of 
the reputation of some of those who have 
supported it, is, or rather one should say, was, 
that it was designed for an astronomical obser- 
vatory. R. A. Proctor, to whose advocacy the 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 55 


idea owes a great deal of what vogue it had, has 
told us that the entrance passage is so placed 
that at the date which he assumes for the erection 
of the pyramid (3400 B.c.) it bore directly on 
the then Pole-Star, Thuban, or Theta Draconis, 
when the star was on the meridian below the 
pole, and further, that the great gallery which 
leads up to the King’s Chamber was designed 
to serve the purpose of a great transit instrument, 
through whose open upper end the transits of 
stars could be observed by astronomers occupying 
seats on cross-benches laid across the gallery at 
different levels! Still wilder are the fancies 
which would have us see in the measurements 
of the Great Pyramid divinely inspired revelations 
as to units of length, capacity, and so forth, and 
which gravely inform us that the granite sarco- 
phagus of Khufu is really a standard measure 
of capacity, of which our British quarter is a 
fourth part. It seems rather a pity in view of 
this wonderful theory that Professor Petrie 
should have just told us of the inferiority of 
Khufu’s sarcophagus in accuracy to that of 
Khafra, as such a fact tends to disturb the mind 
as to the truth of our own measures; but it is 
a sufficient indication of the flimsy nature of 
the foundations on which all these theories 
rest. 

The fact is that no evidence worth considera- 
tion has been brought forward in support of any 
of them, and in especial that the idea of the 
ereat gallery having been a gigantic transit 
instrument (surely the most cumbrous and 
inefficient ever designed) is absolutely negatived 


56 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


by the knowledge which we possess of the object 
with which the whole building was constructed— 
an object whose all-important condition was 
absolute secrecy and concealment. ‘To dream 
that Khufu built a pyramid to secure his body 
from discovery and destruction, and then allowed 
its passages to remain open to the sky for years 
that astronomers might observe the stars, and 
tomb-robbers the plan of the pyramid, is to put 
a fool’s cap on the whole business. The Great 
Pyramid, like all the other pyramids, great and 
small, was none of the extraordinary things 
which we have been told it was; it was some- 
thing simpler and more wonderful than any of 
them—the greatest witness ever given on earth 
to the human craving for immortality ! 

There is no longer any doubt that all the 
pyramids, from the first imperfect conception 
of the form in the Step-Pyramid of Saqqara, 
through the giants of Gizeh, down to the crumb- 
ling heaps of brickwork which are all that remain 
of some of the later fabrics, were built simply 
and solely as tombs, and that their one object was 
to render the resting-place of their royal tenant 
as secure as precautions could make it from the 
attacks of dynastic enemies or mere robbers. 

The pyramid was just one pathetic expression 
of that marvellously persistent passion which 
gave us the tomb-chambers of Abydos, with 
their storerooms for the supply of the dead 
king’s wants in the Underworld, the Mummy 
with all its wonderful elaboration of means for 
preserving the shape and likeness of the dead 
man, the Funerary Statue, with its amazingly 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 57 


lifelike portrait of the man whose place it was 
designed to take when time had reduced the 
mummy to dust, and the soul still craved a 
recognisable dwelling-place, and the long, rock- 
hewn galleries of the Valley of the Kings, with 
their pictured representations of all that could 
help their owner through the dangers and 
difficulties of the long journey to the Egyptian 
Fields of Contentment. 

No race has ever been so possessed by any 
religious idea as was the ancient Egyptian by 
the faith that it was possible to secure immortal 
life for humanity beyond the gates of death, 
possible, but difficult to the last degree, and 
needing all the effort which could be given to 
secure so great and so difficult an end; and the 
Great Pyramid is just the most colossal seal 
ever put on that creed, expressing, as nothing 
else ever could, both the intensity of the con- 
viction and the consciousness of the extreme 
difficulty of its attainment in actual fact. The 
Egyptian Pharaoh built his pyramid as the 
expression of his faith in life everlasting; he 
built it as huge and as massy as he could, as the 
expression of his consciousness of the numberless 
difficulties and dangers which compassed the 
road which led to the attainment of immortality, 
and of his determination that, so far as human 
effort could secure it, he would be secured against 
everything which might prejudice his chance 
of winning eternity. 

The Pyramid, then, is a tomb, or rather it is 
the sole surviving part of the elaborate and 
complicated structure which the Egyptians of 


58 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


the Pyramid period devised for the accomplish- 
ment of this end of securing the duration of the 
personality of its owner. For what we see now 
at Gizeh and elsewhere is by no means what the 
Egyptians of the early dynasties saw when they 
looked upon the “ eternal dwelling-places ” of 
their great kings, but only a fragment, which 
by reason of its massiveness, and especially of 
its form, has survived while the rest of the 
fabric has perished. The complete pyramid- 
complex was a development of the normal 
Egyptian arrangement of tomb-chamber and 
tomb-chapel. Each Egyptian of any rank or 
pretensions was buried in a chamber, generally 
underground, which contained his coffin of stone 
or wood; but he had also another chamber 
above ground, where the necessary rites might 
be observed at the stated times, and the daily 
offerings of food and drink made for his use 
in the other world by his relations or by the 
priests who were appointed for this purpose. 
These two chambers were combined in the 
‘“* mastabas ”’ of the Old Kingdom nobles, with 
their shafts and their chapels. The pyramid 
took the place of the mastaba, and as it developed, 
the chapel, instead of being within the same mass 
of building as the tomb-chamber, was built 
outside, at the foot of the great structure which 
protected the mummy of the king, as was fondly 
hoped, from sacrilegious attack. ‘This pyramid- 
temple lay at the east side of the pyramid, and 
in close connection with it. But the pyramids 
were situated on rising ground, generally at a 
considerable distance from the cultivated land, 


: 


i 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 59 


and it was therefore necessary to arrange for a 
convenient approach to them, instead of allowing 
the priests or the royal relatives to scramble 
over the rough ground. Accordingly a secondary 
temple, or portico, was built down on the level 
of the cultivated land in a position where it could 
be approached by boats during the inundation ; 
and from this portico-temple a covered causeway 
led up to the temple proper at the foot of the 
pyramid. 

We are to conceive of the pyramid fabric, 
then, as consisting of these four parts, first the 
part for whose sake all the rest existed, the 
pyramid itself, with its concealed passages and 
its carefully protected sarcophagus-chamber, in 
which lay the mummy of the king in its granite 
coffin; then the temple crouching at the foot of 
the great tomb-chamber ; then the long covered 
causeway leading down to the lower levels, and 
finally the Portico-temple on the margin of the 
flooded river. One imagines the scene on the 
feast-day of a great Pharaoh—the graceful and 
gaily decorated Egyptian river-skiffs drawing 
up to the stately columned portico on the river 
bank, and landing their freight of white-robed 
priests and gorgeous courtiers and princes of 
the blood, the preliminary service within the 
lower temple, and then the solemn procession 
up the causeway to the temple proper where the 
memory of Khufu or Khafra is celebrated, and 
his wants for the other world supplied under the 
shadow of the mighty mass of stone where the 
bones of the great builder are laid. ‘The Pyramids 
are impressive enough to-day in their stripped 


60 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


and gaunt majesty—one wonders if they could 
be more impressive even in the days of their 
perfected splendour. Possibly not, but at all 
events the world can have seen few more imposing 
sights than an Egyptian Pyramid Field such as 
that of Gizeh, when its three giants were girt 
with all the sumptuous fabrics which were part 
of their essential design as their architects 
planned them, and without which we are no more 
seeing them as they were meant to be seen than 
if we were viewing Salisbury without its spire, 
or the Duomo of Florence without its campanile. 

As to the sumptuousness of these subsidiary 
parts of the pyramid-complex, we have fortunately 
first-hand evidence. Little remains of the temple 
proper of the Second Pyramid, though what there 
is has been completely excavated ; but the cause- 
way leading down from it has been traced, and 
it terminates in a building which has been for 
long familiar as one of the most striking examples 
of the combined restraint and magnificence of 
the Egyptian architects of the early dynasties, 
the so-called ‘Temple of the Sphinx, which is in 
reality the Portico-temple of Khafra’s pyramid. 
With its severely simple architecture of vertical 
and horizontal lines, its great blocks of stone 
absolutely without ornament of any sort, and the 
richness of its granite monoliths and its alabaster 
wall-surfaces, it tells us something of what must 
have been the dignity and splendour of the Gizeh 
Pyramid Field when it stood intact. 

So far as the fulfilment of the object for 
which they were erected is concerned, the 
Pyramids of Gizeh are no more than a melancholy 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 61 


monument of the vanity of human wishes, and 
an illustration of how human cupidity or malice 
will in the long run break through the most 
elaborate system of defence. Professor Petrie 
has suggested that Sir Thomas Browne was in 
the wrong when he wrote that “to be but 
pyramidally extant is a fallacy of duration,’ and 
comments upon that characteristic utterance: 
“ Khufu has provided the grandest monument 
that any man ever had, and is by this means 
better remembered than any other Eastern king 
throughout history.” 

That is so; and yet one cannot help 
remembering that this was not at all Khufu’s 
object in the rearing of his vast mausoleum. It 
was not to keep his memory green, but to keep 
his body intact that the greatest builder of the 
world raised the Great Pyramid, and in that 
simple object he utterly failed, as did all his 
brother pyramid-builders great and small. The 
evidence shows that not in one single case has 
greed or hatred failed to overcome all the obstacles 
placed in their way by royal power. Every 
pyramid known has been rifled in ancient times, 
probably not long after its builder was laid to 
rest in his stately tomb, and the duration of the 
mass of senseless stone, which bids fair to be 
as long as that of the everlasting hills, only 
mocks the hopes with which it was reared. 
The pyramid remains; but the jewel for whose 
sake so costly a casket was devised is long ages 
since “ blown about the desert dust.” 

The story of excavation at the Pyramids of 
Gizeh has nothing very exciting about it. The 


62 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


first excavators were, no doubt, the enemies of 
the Crown, who, as Petrie has suggested, pene- 
trated into the burial-chambers in the troubled 
days between the VIIth and Xth Dynasties and 
wreaked their spite on the bodies of their dead 
masters. ‘Thereafter, through the Classical 
period, the entrance into the subterranean pas- 
sages of the Great Pyramid was well known ; 
but the knowledge had been lost by the time of 
the Arab Conquest, and the Khalif Mamun had 
laboriously to quarry his way through the 
masonry into the actual passages, leaving behind 
him the great hole, which is still called ““ Mamun’s 
Hole.” ‘This was the beginning of the vandalism 
which has done so much destruction at the 
Pyramids of Gizeh, though the worst efforts of 
human stupidity have somehow only seemed to 
emphasise the dignity and grandeur of the great 
buildings whose might mocks at the puny 
attempts of the destroyer. After Mamun had 
showed the way, his successors followed him, 
and used the pyramid as a quarry. In 1356 
Sultan Hasan used part of the casing of the 
Great Pyramid in the building of his mosque, 
and though his work may be, as it has been called, 
“the finest monument in Cairo,” and “ the 
most perfect specimen extant of Saracenic archi- 
tecture,’ its beauty is sadly discounted by the 
fact that it was created by the robbery of the 
most magnificent example of an architecture 
more ancient and more noble. MHasan, or one 
of his immediate successors, added to his crime 
by stripping part of the casing from the Second 
Pyramid also, leaving it in the partially despoiled 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 63 


condition in which it now appears, for one of 
his coins was found by Petrie deep down in 
the southern foundation. Compared with such 
barbarities, the indignities which the Pyramids 
have had to suffer in all ages at the hands of 
tourists, who have insisted on disgracing their un- 
distinguished names by scrawling them on these 
great memorials of the past, are mere trifles. 
Early in the nineteenth century Caviglia 
succeeded in penetrating into the centre of the 
Great Pyramid, and he was followed in the 
spring of 1818 by the redoubtable Belzoni, 
whose account of the manner in which he 
forced an entrance into the Second Pyramid is as 
vivacious as the rest of his narrative. Belzoni’s 
earlier efforts only resulted in the discovery of 
one of the passages by which former explorers 
had vainly attempted to force their way into 
the pyramid; but his disappointment only 
quickened his desire, and as he says in his own 
inimitable way: ‘‘ Hope returned to cherish 
my pyramidical brains.” His workmen were 
speedily set to work again at a new spot. ‘“ As 
to expectation that the entrance might be found, 
they had none; and I often heard them utter, 
in a low voice, the word ‘ magnoon, in plain 
English, madman. I pointed out to the Arabs 
the spot where they had to dig, and such was 
my measurement, that | was right within two 
feet, in a straight direction, as to the entrance ; 
and I have the pleasure of reckoning this day as 
fortunate.” Even after the passage was dis- 
covered, the removal of the blocks of stone which 
obstructed it required several days of hard labour ; 


64 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


but at last, thirty days after the work began, the 
explorer found himself standing in the sarco- 
_ phagus chamber of Khafra. Besides the empty 
sarcophagus, Belzoni found the evidence that he 
had not been the first who had penetrated into 
the secret of the pyramid, for in addition to 
many graffiti on the walls of the chamber, which 
were written in charcoal and rubbed off at the 
slightest touch, there was an Arabic inscription 
which ran: “‘ The Master Mohammed Ahmed, 
lapicide, has opened them; and the Master 
Othman attended this opening : and the King Ali 
Mohammed, from the beginning to the closing up.” 

The Third Pyramid, that of Menkaura, was 
opened in 1226 by treasure-hunters. ‘“ After 
passing through various passages, a room was 
reached wherein was found a long blue vessel 
[the sarcophagus] quite empty. ... They 
found in this basin, after they had broken the 
covering of it, the decayed remains of a man, 
but no treasures, excepting some golden tablets 
inscribed with characters of a language which 
nobody could understand.” 'The disappointed 
treasure-seekers were succeeded in 1837 by 
Colonel Howard Vyse, some of the results of 
whose discoveries are in the British Museum in 
the shape of a fragment of the basalt sarcophagus, 
and portions of a wooden coffin, purporting to 
be that of “ the King of the North and South, 
Men-kau-Ra, living for ever,” together with the 
remains of a man, wrapped in a coarse woollen 
cloth of a yellow colour. ‘“‘In clearing the 
rubbish out of the large entrance room,’’ says 
Colonel Vyse, ‘‘ after the men had been employed 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 65 


there several days and had advanced some 
distance towards the south-eastern corner, some 
bones were. first discovered at the bottom of 
the rubbish ; and the remaining bones and part 
of the coffin were immediately discovered all 
together. No other parts of the coffin or bones 
could be found in the room ; I therefore had the 
rubbish which had been previously turned out 
of the same room carefully re-examined, when 
several pieces of the coffin and of the mummy- 
cloth were found; but in no other part of the 
pyramid were any parts of it to be discovered, 
although every place was most minutely examined, 
to make the coffin as complete as possible.” 
Unfortunately some doubt exists as to the coffin 
being actually of the period which its inscription 
claims, and the same doubt hangs over the 
remains. It has been suggested that the coffin 
is a restoration of the time of the XXVIth 
Dynasty, and that the remains are not those of 
Menkaura, but of one of the treasure-hunters 
who lost his life in the attempt of 1226. Accord- 
ingly we cannot say, as might otherwise have 
been the case, that Vyse actually discovered a 
Pharaoh in the great tomb which he had built 
for his eternal abode. The fine basalt sarco- 
phagus was taken out of the pyramid by Vyse, 
and shipped for England in 1838; but the ill- 
luck which has dogged the pyramid explorations 
attended Menkaura’s coffin also. The ship left 
Leghorn on October 12, 1838, and was never 
heard of again, though some bits of wreckage 
were picked up off Carthagena. 

Valuable work was done at Gizeh during the 

E 


66 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


years after Vyse’s researches by Perring and 
Piazzi Smyth, though the careful measurement 
_ work of the latter was somewhat obscured by 
the fanciful theories which possessed his mind 
on the subject of the purpose of the Great 
Pyramid ; but the most complete survey of the 
Gizeh field was due to Flinders Petrie, who in 
1880-1881 measured and planned the whole 
site with the most scrupulous care. 

Perhaps the most interesting result of his 
work, apart from the evidence which he gathered 
as to Egyptian methods of working stone, was 
his discovery, behind the Second Pyramid, of 
the barracks in which the skilled masons who 
were permanently employed on the building 
lived while the work was going on. These 
were capable of containing easily about 4000 
men. ‘The rest of the 100,000, who, as Herodotus 
tells us, were employed in the building of the 
Great Pyramid, were doubtless merely labourers 
employed during the three months of high Nile, 
when work on the land was impossible, to bring 
up the blocks of stone and leave them ready for 
the skilled hewers and masons to work upon. 
As to the methods of these skilled workmen, 
evidence of the most interesting kind was 
accumulated. It was found that the great blocks 
of stone were sawn by means of bronze saws over 
nine feet in length, and equipped with jewelled 
cutting points. ‘The sarcophagi of hard granite 
or basalt were thus sawn to shape with the most 
remarkable accuracy, while they were hollowed 
out by cutting rows of holes with tubular drills 
also set with jewelled cutting points. The 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 67 


chief difference between this kind of ancient 
Egyptian work and modern practice with diamond 
drills is that the ancient work is undeniably 
superior to the modern. “ Truth to tell, modern 
drill corés cannot hold a candle to the Egyptians ; 
by the side of the ancient work they look 
wretchedly scraped out and irregular.”’ ‘‘ There 
has been no flinching or jumping of the tool,” 
says Petrie again, speaking of a drill core from 
Gizeh, “‘ every crystal, quartz, or felspar has 
been cut through in the most equable way, with 
a clean irresistible cut.”’ 

Our wonder at the mighty mass of the 
Pyramids of Gizeh, then, is not to be mere wonder 
at the barbaric power which summoned myriads 
of slaves and forced them to toil till by sheer 
brute force they had piled up these mountains 
of stone. Brute force, unguided and unorganised, 
would never have built the Pyramids, though 
millions instead of thousands had been employed, 
and for centuries instead of decades, but would 
only have led to disaster and confusion. The 
wonder of the Pyramids is that five thousand 
years ago there was found a race whose keen 
intelligence so clearly understood the need and 
the marvellous power of organised and trained 
human labour, architects and engineers who 
were capable of directing the energies of a hundred 
thousand men without confusion towards a 
clearly foreseen end, and craftsmen who were 
capable of producing, with tools whose material 
seems to us pathetic in its inadequacy, results 
which put to shame the best achievements of 
men using the finest modern tools. 


68 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


The recent excavations in the Gizeh Pyramid 
Field, directed by Dr. G. A. Reisner, have added 
much to our knowledge of the subordinate tombs 
of the period, and of the life of the times. 

Moving southwards from Gizeh, we come to 
the pyramid field of Abusir, passing on the way 
the unfinished pyramid of Zawiyet el Aryan. 
Of this pyramid, designed for the Pharaoh Nefer- 
ka-Ra of the IIIrd Dynasty, nothing exists 
above ground. The remains consist simply of 
the trenches destined for the superstructure, 
and the inclined plane leading down to the 
mortuary chamber with its fine oval libation- 
trough, or sarcophagus. Yet there are few 
works of ancient Egypt which impress one more 
with the sense of the magnificent power with 
which these early architects carried out their 
designs. ‘‘ The whole,’ says Maspero, “ is 
merely a T-shaped ditch, some 100 feet deep ; 
and yet the impression it makes when one goes 
down into it is unforgettable. The richness 
and the cutting of the materials, the perfection 
of the joints and sections, the incomparable 
finish of the basin, the boldness of the lines and 
the height of the walls all combine to make up a 
unique creation.” 

The German excavations have resulted in 
the discovery at Abusir of a curious development 
both of the pyramid idea and of the early Egyptian 
temple. It was already known from one of the 
magical tales of the Westcar Papyrus, that the 
kings of the Vth Dynasty were probably a 
priestly line of usurpers, who claimed to be 
related to the Sun-god Ra by direct descent— 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 69 


a relationship which was henceforth claimed by 
every subsequent Pharaoh, and embodied in 
the royal titulary. The German Expedition has 
revealed to us the unmistakable proof of the 
devotion of the Vth Dynasty kings to the worship 
of the Sun-god, and the unique form which their 
temples took. The temple of Ne-user-ra, for 
example, consisted of a rectangular court, 380 feet 
by 280 feet, whose main axis ran east and west. 
In the western half of this area rose the pyramid, 
a curious combination of the idea of the mastaba- 
pyramid of Seneferu at Medum and the later 
obelisk. On a great block of building about 
130 feet square by 100 feet in height, shaped like 
a truncated pyramid, rose a squat brick obelisk 
whose point reached a height of about 120 feet. 
Roofed corridors surrounded the enclosure on 
the other three sides, and probably provided 
storerooms for the temple furniture, and for the 
materials of the offerings. At the foot of the 
pyramid an immense alabaster altar stood in a 
small court surrounded by low walls. The 
Obelisk, on its truncated pyramid, represented 
the Sun-god, and outside the temple wall, near 
the south side, was placed the most curious of 
all the furnishings of this curious temple, in the 
shape of a great boat, built of brick, which bore 
all the sacred insignia of the Sun-god in his 
voyage across the heavens. ‘The interior of the 
temple walls was covered with sculptured scenes 
of the life created by the god, scenes from the 
river, the swamps, the fields and the desert, 
these being the earliest specimens of such mural 
decorations in any Egyptian temple. | 


40 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


The next stage of the Great Pyramid Field is 
at Saqqara, where the chief feature is the most 
ancient, and save for the monsters of Gizeh, the 
most famous of all the pyramids, the Stepped- 
Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd Dynasty, 
the earliest great stone structure in the world. 
This remarkable building was probably the work 
of Zeser’s famous counsellor and architect 
Imhotep, the typical wise man of early Egypt, 
whose counsel was “ as though one inquired at 
the oracle of God,’’ and who was subsequently 
deified and became the patron-deity of the scribes. 

The tomb which he reared for his master 
(who had also another great tomb at Bet-Khallaf) 
was built in six stages, stands about 197 feet in 
height, and has the peculiarity that its base is 
not a square but a rectangle, measuring 394 by 
351 feet. But though the interest attaching to 
man’s first great piece of stonework must always 
be great, the actually living interest at Saqqara 
attaches not so much to Zeser’s hoary and im- 
posing tomb, as to the comparatively insignificant 
and decayed pyramids of the Vth and VIth 
Dynasty kings, Unas, Teti, Pepy I, Merenra, 
and Pepy II. Mere heaps of rubble and sand as 
they seem, with none of the splendour of con- 
struction or greatness of scale of the Gizeh group, 
these monuments of the time when the royal 
power of the Old Kingdom was beginning to 
decline are yet of supreme value; for they are 
the first pyramids in which inscriptions have 
been found, and the long religious texts discovered 
in them, and now known as the Pyramid Texts, 
are unique and of infinite importance. 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 71 


Up to the end of his career, Mariette believed 
that the pyramids were dumb, as the Gizeh 
group had proved to be, and therefore looked 
upon the attempt to open any of the Saqqara 
group as mere waste labour. Maspero, however, 
believed otherwise, and the opening of the 
pyramid of Pepy I in 1880 proved that he was 
right. The other pyramids named proved also 
to be inscribed, and altogether the five pyramids 
give us a series of religious texts covering a 
period of about one hundred and fifty years, or 
perhaps one hundred and eighty, from 2825 to 
2644 B.C., or, on Petrie’s dating, from 4275 to 
4090 B.C. Even taking the later dates, these 
Pyramid T'exts form by far the earliest large body 
of religious writings which have come down from 
any part of the ancient East, and their importance 
as sources of knowledge as to the beliefs of the 
earliest Dynastic period can scarcely be overrated. 

Apart from the interest of its pyramids, 
Saqqara has proved of infinite value to the 
student of ancient Egyptian life because of the 
richness of its necropolis in the great mastaba 
tombs of the nobles of the Old Kingdom. Since 
Mariette’s excavation of the tomb of Ti, who was 
a great man in his day, and architect to two 
successive kings of the Vth Dynasty, Nefer-ari- 
ka-ra and Ne-user-ra, the sculptures of this 
splendid tomb, and those, scarcely less remark- 
able, of the tombs of Ptah-hetep, Mereruka and 
Kagemni, have been recognised as among the 
most precious accomplishments of ancient art. 

Apart altogether from their artistic value, 
their importance as first-hand documents for 


72 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


the reconstruction of life in ancient Egypt five 
thousand years ago is supreme, for their repre- 
sentations, executed with infinite vivacity and 
spirit, cover almost every department of Egyptian 
life. ‘The great man is represented as surrounded 
by all the busy life which ministered to his com- 
fort when he was on earth, or engaged in the 
sports and diversions which were his relaxation 
in the intervals of his public duties, sailing, 
fishing, fowling, or hippopotamus-hunting among 
the Nile swamps. Farm life, with its changing 
activities according to the season, and all its 
peaceful and beautiful incident, is faithfully 
depicted, so that the crops which the Egyptian 
landowner grew and the stock he kept can be 
perfectly known ; while all the crafts which were 
necessary to the upkeep of a great estate are also 
depicted with abundant detail and a charming 
directness and dash. ‘The tomb-paintings of the 
New Empire at Thebes are much and deservedly 
admired ; but even they must yield in freshness 
and charm to these pictures from the dawn of 
history, which have the dew of youth still upon 
them, and all the vigour of an art which is already 
quite sure of itself, but has not had the time to 
grow Stale. 

From Dahshur down to Hlahun and Hawara 
lie the pyramids of the great kings of the XIIth 
Dynasty, who, though Thebans, realised that 
the centre of gravity of the national government 
must be further north, and who therefore made 
their royal residence between Memphis and the 
Fayum. The earlier kings of the dynasty, 
Amenemhat I and Senusert I, had their pyramids 











7. CHASED GOLD PECTORAL ORNAMENTS OF SENUSERT II 
AND III (xX1Ith DYNASTY). 


(From ‘* Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.’’) 





PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 73 


at Lisht; Amenemhat II and Senusert III 
preferred Dahshur for their resting-place ; while 
Senusert II chose Lahun, and Amenemhat III 
Hawara, where he could sleep beside the great 
works which he had wrought at Lake Moeris for 
the welfare of his land. The XIIth Dynasty 
pyramids are not imposing externally. The 
ruinous piles of brickwork at Dahshur and Lahun 
look more like gigantic ant-heaps than true 
pyramids ; yet they were the work of kings who 
in their own way were quite as powerful as 
the pyramid-builders of the IVth Dynasty, and 
the detail of the inner workmanship of the 
sarcophagus chambers is quite as remarkable 
as anything to be seen at Gizeh. Part of the 
reason for the difference is a change, not so much 
in the ideal for which the pyramid was con- 
structed (for that remained constant throughout 
the history of Egypt), but in the conception of 
the best means towards the realising of the 
ideal. “It seems,” says Petrie, describing the 
change which Senusert II introduced in his 
pyramid at Lahun, “that the pyramids of the 
earlier kings had fallen a prey to violence already, 
the signs of personal spite in the destructions are 
evident. ‘Therefore Senusert II determined to 
abandon the old system of a north entrance in 
the face, and to conceal the access to the interior 
by a new method.” His method was to excavate 
his sarcophagus chamber entirely out of the 
solid rock on which the pyramid was founded, 
and to place the entrance to the passage which 
led to the chamber outside of the pyramid 
altogether. ‘The shaft which gives access to the 


74 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


passage actually opens out on the plain, beneath 
the floor of the tomb of one of the princesses 
of the dynasty. Inside the rock-hewn chamber 
which was protected with such care, and which 
was splendidly lined with red granite, stood the 
red granite sarcophagus, “* exquisitely wrought,” 
says Petrie, ‘“‘ the errors of flatness and straightness 
being matters of thousandths of an inch.” 

Yet the cunning and the skill of the XIIth 
Dynasty architects and masons proved as helpless 
as the massive power of the [Vth Dynasty to 
protect the dead monarchs from the ravages of 
hatred or greed. Nor were the elaborate pre- 
cautions of Amenemhat III any more successful 
than those of his grandfather had been. Petrie’s 
description of the construction of the inner 
passages of Amenemhat’s pyramid at Hawara 
reads like something planned to be a nightmare 
to explorers. ‘‘ The explorer,’ he says, ‘ who 
had found the entrance in the unusual place on 
the south side, descended a long staircase, which 
ended in a dumb chamber. ‘The roof of this, 
if slid aside, showed another passage, which was 
filled with blocks. This was a mere blind, to 
divert attention from the real passage, which 
stood ostentatiously open. A _ plunderer has, 
however, fruitlessly mined his way through all 
these blocks. On going down the real passage, 
another dumb chamber was reached; another 
sliding trap-door was passed; another passage 
led to a third dumb chamber ; a third trap-door 
was passed; and now a passage led along past 
one side of the real sepulchre; and to amuse 
explorers, two false wells open in the passage 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 75 


floor, and the wrong side of the passage is filled 
with masonry blocks fitted in. Yet by some 
means the plunderers found a cross trench in 
the passage floor which led to the chamber. 
Here another device was met. The chamber 
had no door, but was entered solely by one of 
the immense roof-blocks, weighing 45 tons, 
being left raised, and afterwards dropped into 
place on closing the pyramid.” One would have 
imagined that with such precautions the sleep of 
Amenemhat would surely be undisturbed ; but 
when Petrie in 1889 tunnelled his way through 
the roofing-beams of the sepulchral chamber 
he found that an early plunderer had anticipated 
him by mining right through the great 45-ton 
block. ‘‘ The royal interments had been entirely 
burnt; and only fired grains of diorite and 
pieces of lazuli inlaying showed the splendour of 
the decorations of the coffins.” 

Here, as in all the other cases of the pyramids, 
the very elaboration of the means adopted for 
the preservation of the dead body of the king 
had only whetted the appetite of the spoiler and 
destroyer, and little has survived from the XIIth 
Dynasty pyramids to reward the modern explorer. 
The great finds in the XIIth Dynasty pyramid 
fields were all from outside the pyramids. Of 
these one of the most valuable, though by no 
means the most spectacular, was Petrie’s dis- 
covery, near the pyramid of Senusert II at 
Lahun, of the town, created specially for the 
occasion, in which the workmen of Senusert had 
lived with their staff of architects, overseers, and 
scribes, while the pyramid was under construction. 


76 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


The little town of Ha-hetep-Senusert, Kahun 
as it is now called, gives us the most complete 
instance extant of the character of an Egyptian 
town of the Middle Kingdom. It occupied an 
area of about 18 acres, and the plans of the narrow — 
streets and of the houses, mostly small and closely 
crowded together, though there are exceptions 
to this rule, have been completely wrought out. 
Much that is interesting in the way of pottery, 
tools, and papyri came from the ruins of the 
deserted houses of the little pyramid-town, 
whose existence seems to have been a very brief 
one, probably not much longer than was necessary 
for the erection of the pyramid. 

Again it was not in Amenemhat’s elaborately 
devised pyramid at Hawara, but in the Roman 
cemetery to the north of it, that the great find was 
made which has made Hawara famous in the 
history of ancient Egyptian art, and has given us 
one of the most valuable contributions ever 
made to our knowledge of the processes and 
technique of ancient painting. A cemetery which 
dates mostly from A.D. instead of from B.c. has 
in general comparatively little attraction to the 
explorer in ancient Egypt, unless he be a specialist 
in the Greco-Roman Period. Accordingly, when 
Petrie in 1888 found that the cemetery in question 
was of the first and second centuries A.D., he was 
on the point of giving it up as not worth working, 
when one day a mummy was found with a painted 
portrait on a wooden panel inserted above 
its face. The picture was a beautifully drawn 
head of a girl, painted in soft tones, and quite 
un-Egyptian in its style. It proved to be only 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 77 


the forerunner of a whole series of similar 
portraits, of which about sixty were found before 
the excavations closed. The work was resumed 
in 1911 with further success. ‘The portraits 
are of varying merit, and of even the best of them 
it has to be remembered that we are not dealing 
with the product of the studio of a skilled artist, 
but only with that of the workshop of a firm of 
local undertakers, who supplied funerary portraits 
just as they supplied cofhns. All things con- 
sidered the quality of the work is wonderfully 
good, and the information given by these panel 
pictures as to the methods of the ancient painters 
is of the highest importance. Before the Hawara 
discoveries, we were left very much in the dark 
as to how Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus and their 
companions and rivals produced the master- 
pieces which have only survived in the literary 
descriptions of their contemporaries. The 
Hawara pictures may be very far, even the best 
of them, from being masterpieces ; but at least 
they tell us what were the methods by which 
the great painters of ancient Greece produced 
the pictures which were considered the equals 
in artistic merit of the statues which are now 
the wonder of the world. The manner in 
which they were painted is often described as 
‘“‘encaustic,” but this is an incorrect description 
of portraits which, so far as can be judged, were 
simply painted with melted coloured wax, laid 
on with a free brush, each tint being laid on as 
a solid body, and not subjected to subsequent 
olazings. 


The XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields at Dahshur 


78 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


and Illahun have yielded two of the most remark- 
able finds of Egyptian jewellery which have ever 
been made, and the results of the work of 
de Morgan and Petrie in this respect are such 
as to increase our admiration for the marvellous 
skill of the craftsmen of the Middle Kingdom. 
It was in 1894 and 1895 that de Morgan’s work- 
men, clearing up the area round the XIIth 
Dynasty pyramids at Dahshur, found in the 
tombs of the princesses of the royal house one 
of the most wonderful stores of jewellery which 
have ever rewarded excavation. The two most 
notable pieces of the treasure were the diadems 
of the princess Khnumit, the most exquisite 
examples of the skill of the goldsmith ever 
worn. ‘“‘ The floret crown,” says Petrie, “is 
perhaps the most charmingly graceful head- 
dress ever seen; the fine wavy threads of gold 
harmonised with the hair, and the delicate little 
flowers and berries seem scattered with the wild 
grace of Nature. Lach floret is held by two wires 
crossing in an eye behind it, and each pair of 
berries has likewise an eye in which the wires 
cross. ‘The florets are not stamped, but each 
gold socket is made by hand for the four inserted 
stones. The berries are of lazuli. In no in- 
stance, however small, was the polishing of the 
stone done in its cloison ; it was always finished 
before setting.’ The other diadem is more 
conventional, but scarcely less beautiful. Eight 
rosettes of gold and precious stones are sur- 
mounted with motives of lyre shape terminating 
in golden flowers, and the rosettes are united 
by long links also bearing jewelled rosettes, 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 79 


The stones of the two crowns are lapis-lazuli, 
carnelian, red jasper, and green felspar. Along 
with the diadems were found gold pectorals of 
fine design and execution, bearing the car- 
touches of Senusert II, Senusert III, and 
Amenemhat III, and various other articles of 
jewellery, and even the famous jewellery of 
Queen Aah-hotep, so long the typical specimen 
of Egyptian craftsmanship, must yield the palm 
to the earlier work in beauty of design and 
daintiness of execution. 

The second discovery came in February, 
1914, when Professor Petrie’s workmen were 
clearing a rifled tomb belonging to the “ Royal 
daughter Sat-Hathor-ant”’ at Lahun near the 
pyramid of Senusert II. How the treasure of 
Lahun had ever escaped the plunderers who had 
rifled the tomb is a mystery. ‘‘ The tomb had 
been attacked,” says Petrie; “the long and 
heavy work of shifting the massive granite lid 
of the sarcophagus, and breaking it away, had 
been achieved ; yet all this gold was left in the 
recess of the passage untouched. . . . The whole 
treasure seems to have been stacked in the recess 
at the time of the burial, and to have gradually 
dropped apart as the wooden caskets decayed 
in course of years, with repeated flooding of 
storm water and mud slowly washed into the 
pit. ... The whole treasure was standing in 
an open recess, within arm’s reach of the gold- 
seekers, while they worked at breaking open 
the granite sarcophagus.” We can only be 
thankful that all the luck did not go to the ancient 
robber, and that, like his earlier companion who 


80 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


left the arm of the Ist Dynasty queen, with its 
jewelled bracelets, at Abydos, he overlooked 
something to tell a later age of the skill and taste 
of ancient Egypt. 

The chief feature of the Lahun find was a 
perfect specimen of a royal diadem, bearing the 
urzus on its front. No actual specimen of the 
famous double crown of Egypt has ever come 
to light, familiar though its appearance may be, 
probably because its materials were of a perishable 
nature; but the diadem of Lahun gives us a 
_unique specimen of such a crown as Egyptian 
royalty may often have worn in preference to 
the cumbrous mitre so frequently figured. ‘“‘ It 
is formed by a broad band of highly burnished 
gold over an inch wide, and large enough to 
pass round the bushy wig worn in the XIIth 
Dynasty. The urzus is of open work, inlaid 
with lazuli and carnelian; the head is of lazuli, 
which was found loose in the mud. Around 
the polished band were affixed fifteen rosettes, 
each composed of four flowers with intermediate 
buds. At the back a tube of gold was riveted 
on to the band, and into that fitted a double 
plume of sheet gold, the stem of which slipped 
through a flower of solid gold. ‘The thickness 
of the plumes was such that they would wave 
slightly with every movement of the head. At 
the back and sides of the crown were streamers 
of gold, which hung from hinges attached to 
the rosettes. ‘The whole construction was over 
a foot and a half high.” Such was an Egyptian 
diadem in the great days of the Middle Kingdom, 
and surely never did a royal head wear a more 





Ww 







Sect Dok 


staged 


8. Above, CROWNS OF GOLD INLAID WITH STONES OF 
KHNUMIT. Below, GRANULATED GOLD WORK. 


ALL 
XIIth DYNASTY. 


(From ‘‘ Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.’*) 


4 Melon ty 
At : aS 
fa ts a 






a tipi ¢ eo) ee ce a on 
= VL <> we} e 4 


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4 ~<A A 
vol ] z ; nyt i a Vas 
ice ; Lomas oA ate ar 
ee siete) i. : ho iv oe aac) 
ae: aes « PAN Phos re i Ae age ; 
ee ee he jek) nn Be kes es ner MS ee ba oe 


=a hme | ' = 
rs 7 i y le 7 seu" hoa [. aes 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 81 


graceful emblem of sovereignty than that which 
came so strangely to light in 1914. 

Along with the crown were found two 
pectorais, one of Senusert II, the other of 
Amenemhat III, of even finer design than the 
famous pectorals of Dahshur. ‘“ The earlier 
pectoral is inlaid with minute feathering of 
lazuli and turquoise ; the later with a different 
feathering of lazuli and white paste, which has 
probably been green. .. . They were probably 
suspended by necklaces of the very rich deep 
amethyst beads which were found here.”’ With 
the pectorals went several gold and jewelled 
collars and necklets, and broad armlets of golden 
bars with beads of carnelian and turquoise, and 
inlaid clasps bearing the royal cartouche, and 
a number of other articles, amulets and _ toilet 
utensils, including a silver mirror with a handle 
of obsidian, inlaid with bands of plaited gold, 
and bearing a cast gold head of Hathor. Another 
item came to light from Lahun in 1920 in the 
shape of the royal urzus of Senusert II, “a 
massive gold casting, with inlay of carnelian and 
lazuli, a head of lazuli, and eyes of garnet in gold 
setting,” which was found near the sepulchral 
chamber in the heart of the pyramid, amidst a 
heap of dust and chips of stone. Doubtless 
this is the royal emblem which adorned the brow 
of Senusert when he was laid to rest in his 
pyramid, though how it escaped the notice of 
the robbers who plundered his tomb 1s as great 
a mystery as the escape of the treasure of 
Sat-Hathor-ant. 

Thus the pyramids of the XIIth Dynasty 

F 


82 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 


monarchs, insignificant as they may seem in 
comparison with the gigantic piles of Gizeh, 
have proved in their way no less interesting than 
the colossal work of Khufu, Khafra, and Men- 
kaura. Indeed each of the pyramid groups has 
its own characteristics, and has given its own 
contribution to our knowledge of the successive 
periods of early Egyptian history. ‘To the mighty 
structures of the [Vth Dynasty we owe the 
revelation of the marvellous organisation of the 
Egyptian kingdom, and the skill with which its 
resources could be concentrated on a single 
gigantic task. ‘I’o the less imposing buildings 
of the Vth and VIth Dynasties we owe something 
perhaps even more precious—the revelation of 
the thoughts which were shaping themselves in 
the mind of man in these most ancient days 
with regard to the soul and its life beyond the 
srave. ‘To those of the XIIth Dynasty we owe 
the evidence of the skill which shaped the marvel- 
lous red-granite sarcophagus of Senusert II, 
or the great quartzite funeral chamber of 
Amenemhat III, and the union of luxury with 
the finest taste which created the jewellery of 
Dahshur and Lahun. It may be questioned if 
even the tomb of Tutankhamen, with all its 
mass of splendour, will have anything to show 
us which can surpass in grace and dignity the 
diadems of Khnumit and Sat-Hathor-ant, or 
in exquisiteness of finish their pectorals and 
armlets. 

With the decline of the royal power at the 
close of the XIIth Dynasty, the age of the 
pyramid-builders closes. Already the taste for 


PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 83 


these huge structures was being modified, as 
it was continually found how powerless they 
were to accomplish the great end for which they 
were designed—the protection of the dead body 
of the king from the hatred of his enemies or the 
greed of the professional tomb-robber. The 
decay of the royal power which is so marked 
even in the beginnings of the dark period which 
now ensues no doubt completed a process which 
disillusionment had already begun; and when 
Egypt once more found herself under a strong 
and stable government, the Theban kings who 
delivered her from the Hyksos tyranny had 
recourse to another device for securing the 
continuity of existence after death, and instead 
of piling mountains of stone or brick above 
their sepulchral chambers, were hewing in the 
Valley of the Kings the galleries and halls which 
have been yielding up their secrets in our time 
for the wonder and instruction of the world. 


CHAPTER V 
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


CARCELY less famous than the pyramids, 
S and of far greater beauty, are the 
splendid temples whose ruins extend 

from Heliopolis, close to the Delta, to Phil, 
where the beautiful shrines of Isis, exquisite in 
their setting, even if of late date for Egypt, are 
now becoming only memories of a beauty which 
has had to yield to the claims of present-day life. 
Egypt, almost equally with Greece, may claim to 
be the Land of Temples ; and certainly no other 
land of the ancient East can rival her in the 
number, the scale, and the magnificence of the 
shrines which she reared to her innumerable 
gods. ‘The claim of the Greek to be the supreme 
temple-builder of the ancient world is, of course, 
unquestioned, and nothing in Egypt can bear 
comparison with the serene beauty of the 
Parthenon ; but, though the Egyptian architect 
knew nothing of that exquisite balance and 
harmony of proportion which has made Greek 
architecture the crown of human effort in sacred 
building, the temples of Egypt have a grandeur 
and impressiveness of their own which make a pro- 
found appeal to the mind ; and the contribution 

84 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES = 85 


of the Egyptian to the sum of human achieve- 
ment in this respect is coming to be more and 
more appreciated every day. 

The pyramids show him to have been one of 
the great master-builders of the world in respect 
of the vastness of his creations; the temples, 
often scarcely less impressive in this respect, 
show him to have been also a master in the art 
of constructing stately and nobly proportioned 
examples of that art of the column and architrave 
of which the temples of Hellas gave the supreme 
demonstration. ‘T’he question of how much the 
Greek owed to the earlier builder may still be 
the subject of debate; but there can be no 
question of the originality of the architects who 
gave to the world such noble specimens of the 
builder’s art as the great colonnades of Karnak 
and Luxor, the beautiful terraces of Der el-Bahri, 
and the later glories of Edfu and Philz. 

In one sense there can be comparatively little 
to tell in the way of a story of excavation with 
regard to the Egyptiantemples. In Mesopotamia 
and Babylonia the remains of the great temples 
of Anu and Adad, of Enlil, and of Marduk, owe 
their restoration to the light of day entirely to 
the spade of the excavator, for they were 
completely buried beneath the dust of ages in 
the great mounds of Ashur, Nippur, and Babylon, 
and almost nothing was visible to tell of their 
former splendours till the modern excavator 
patiently stripped away the mantle in which time 
had wrapped them. 

But the temples of Egypt had never 
experienced the oblivion which had covered their 


86 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


northern rivals. They had suffered, indeed, 
many things at the hands of Time and of human 
vandalism. Sometimes they were half-buried in 
the sand which had risen higher and higher, 
century after century, around their columns ; 
sometimes the shrines of a rival faith had been 
thrust incongruously into their ruined courts, or 
an Arab village had grown up like an ugly 
parasite on their roofs ; but there always remained 
enough to tell that the work of one of the great 
master-building races of the world was there, 
waiting the time when it should be stripped of 
these paltry accretions, and revealed in its full 
beauty. Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, and 
their companion shrines were never quite for- 
gotten, and even Hatshepsut’s exquisite terraces 
at Der el-Bahri, half-smothered beneath the sand, 
and wrecked by Coptic fanaticism though they 
were, still showed enough to enable the 
first European explorers who described them 
(MM. Jollois and Devilliers of Napoleon’s 
Expedition of 1798) to be sure of the general 
character of the building which lay beneath the 
rubbish-heaps. 

Accordingly the work of the excavator in 
connection with the temples of Egypt has not 
been so much the discovery of the unknown as 
the recovery of the complete form of what was 
already partially known, the clearing away of the 
excrescences which had attached themselves in 
the course of centuries to the original structures ; 
the preservation of the more delicate work, such 
as relief-sculpture and painting, from further 
injury ; the re-establishment in a state of security 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 87 


of tottering walls and columns; and, not least, 
the tracing out of the history of the building of 
temples which were in general the work of 
centuries, and of many kings. It has all been 
work which, from its very nature, can have but 
little of the nature of romance about it, which has 
but seldom led to any startling finds, which has 
involved a colossal amount of sheer hard labour, 
without any very conspicuous rewards; but 
which has resulted in the temples becoming 
intelligible to the ordinary traveller, and safe for 
his interest for generations to come, and has 
enabled us to trace, in the case of a great structure 
like Karnak, the successive stages by which the 
vast building grew to a finished whole. 

It is, of course, obviously impossible to 
attempt to tell, even in the scantiest outline, 
the story of a work which has extended over the 
whole length of the land from the Delta to the 
furthest bounds of Egyptian influence in Nubia, 
and has been carried on by scores of workers 
of all nationalities. Perhaps our end will best 
be served by taking a typical instance of the 
recovery of a temple, and telling in more or less 
detail the story of the work which gave it back 
to present-day knowledge. We take as our 
example Queen Hatshepsut’s terraced temple at 
Der el-Bahri, one of the most beautiful, as it is 
now also one of the most famous, of Egyptian 
buildings. 

In all Egypt there is probably no more 
beautiful or imposing site than that of the 
“Paradise of Amen,” which the great queen 
reared to the glory of the Theban god and of 


88 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


her own name. On the western side of the Nile, 
almost exactly opposite Karnak, the limestone 
cliffs of the Libyan Range sweep backwards in a 
great semicircle, forming a bay across whose 
mouth is drawn the long line of the funerary 
temples of the Theban kings of the XVIIIth 
and XIXth Dynasties. Behind them, and behind 
the innumerable tombs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh 
and the Northern Assassif, there lies, close against 
the salmon-red cliffs, the building which, of all 
Egyptian temples, makes the strongest appeal 
of pure beauty, as distinguished from the 
impressiveness which comes from sheer scale 
and mass. 

The site is one which offers peculiar 
advantages, but is also encompassed with peculiar 
risks. No more magnificent background for a 
building could be desired; but the background 
is precisely of such magnificence as to form a 
dangerous pitfall in which a merely mediocre 
architect would have been lost. ‘To attempt to 
compete with Nature, when the work of man has 
to be placed in such close proximity with her 
towering architecture, would be to ensure hopeless 
defeat and to invite ridicule. Khufu’s mountain 
of stone gets its full value from contrast with the 
long lines of the desert plateau on whose edge it 
stands. ‘The columns and obelisks of Karnak 
and Luxor are far enough from the hills on either 
bank of the Nile to make the human handiwork 
the central and impressive feature of the picture ; 
but the site at Der el-Bahri would have made 
what was possible elsewhere a mere derision. 
To have placed the huge columns which seem so 


‘“MaIA IVMENGD ‘INHVE-TE UAC “ATAWAL S,LASdaHSLVH °6 








WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 89 


great on the Theban plain in competition with 
the soaring vertical lines of the Libyan cliffs 
would have been to place a fool’s cap on the most 
grandiose work of human hands. What was 
needed at Der el-Bahri was a building which 
should avoid the very idea of rivalry with Nature’s 
handiwork, and which should conquer by subjec- 
tion, a building where all the emphasis should 
be laid on the horizontal lines of structure, so as 
to disclaim at once the thought of competition 
with the towering buttresses and bastions behind. 
It may be questioned if ever an architect more 
thoroughly appreciated the conditions of his 
problem, or more satisfactorily fulfilled them, 
than did Senmut, when he designed for Queen 
Hatshepsut the three rising courts of the Paradise 
of Amen, with the long slopes leading from the 
one to the other, and the stately colonnades, 
where the shadows are so cunningly pressed into 
the decorative scheme, and the vertical lines of 
the columns give emphasis to the horizontality 
of the whole conception, and never for one 
moment suggest rivalry with the cliffs above. 
Excavation, which has done so much for our 
knowledge of Der el-Bahri, has taught us that the 
originality of the XVIIIth Dynasty architect was 
not quite so absolute as was once imagined, and 
that he owed at least the idea of colonnaded 
terraces to the great man of the XIth Dynasty, 
Mertisen or another, who designed the pyramid- 
temple, ‘“‘ Glorious are the seats of King 
Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra,” for his royal master. 
But Senmut was one of those great men who, 
though they take their blessings where they find 


90 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


them, can never be accused of plagiarism, because 
they give back to the world the original idea 
transfigured and glorified. He has made the idea 
of the terraced courts and colonnades his own, 
while avoiding the heavy central block, which, 
with its somewhat paltry pyramid (if this was 
ever completed), must have been a contradiction 
to the whole conception of the rest of the building; 
and his spacious courts, with their almost Greek 
grace of surrounding colonnade, seem touched 
with a spirit which is lacking in the older work. 

Mr. Robert Hichens has told us how “ after 
the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after 
the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the 
erandeur of its colossus, the temple at Deir-el- 
Bahari came upon him like a delicate woman, 
perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of 
white and blue and orange, standing—ever so 
knowingly—against a background of orange and 
pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette 
of the mountain’; and though his idea is quite 
too fantastically elaborated (for the idea of 
conscious striving after prettiness is the last 
thing one could think of in connection with 
Der el-Bahri), yet the idea of femininity does occur 
to the mind when the temple is compared with 
other Egyptian work. Hatshepsut had not much 
of the weak woman about her, to all appearance, 
and Senmut, if his statues are any clue to the man, 
was as rough-hewn and masculine a piece of 
granite as one might encounter; but between 
them they managed to rear a temple which 
stands alone in Egypt for the feminine quality 
of grace. 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES | g1 


So now we may turn to the story of how this 
most graceful of Egyptian temples, unique in 
its grace if not in its main idea, and unique also 
in that it is the only temple in Egypt which came 
into being wholly at the bidding of a woman, was 
rescued from the accumulations of two and a 
half millenniums of neglect and the ravages of 
religious fanaticism. 

Hatshepsut’s temple was first made known 
to the modern world, as we have seen, by 
MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two of the savants 
attached to Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798. The 
English traveller Pococke had indeed visited the 
site in 1737 ; but the thing which chiefly interested 
him was the abundance of mummies, and all 
that can be learned about the temple from his 
mention of it is that in his day the sanctuary was 
apparently accessible. ‘‘ Here it seemed,” he 
says, ‘‘ as though the mountain had been vertically 
hewn out by the hand of man, and the people of 
the place said that there had once been a passage 
through it into the next valley ’—the Valley of 
the Kings. 

What the French explorers saw sixty years 
later was not a great deal more. They traced 
what they believed to be the bases of a series of 
sphinxes which had formerly formed an avenue, 
42 feet wide and 437 yards long, leading up to 
the enclosure-wall of the temple, the remains of 
a wall which must have formed part of one of the 
terraces, what they took for the evidence of two 
flights of steps, leading to the higher levels of 
the building, the central part of the highest 
platform, and the rock-cut sanctuary which 


92 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


Pococke had seen. ‘The rest of the temple was 
completely covered with heaps of sand and — 
rubbish. 

The next visitor of importance was the famous. 
Champollion, who, as was natural in the first 
decipherer of the hieroglyphics, was _ chiefly 
interested in the inscriptions which were visible, 
especially on the granite trilithon portal of the 
upper platform; and the great scholar at once 
recognised the existence in these of a puzzle 
which was only to be solved later. He read the 
cartouche of Hatshepsut as that of a king 
Amenenthe ; but was surprised to see that all 
the nouns and verbs referring to this unknown 
king were in the feminine, and that the royal 
builder was addressed by Amen-Ra as “ His 
daughter whom he loves.’ He imagined the 
existence of a female ruler Amense, who must 
have been connected by marriage with an 
unknown Thothmes, and also with the unknown 
Amenenthe, and his solution of the mystery, 
though his names were incorrect, was, after all, 
not so far from the truth. 

Champollion found evidence in the work of 
the temple of one of his favourite theories—that 
Greek art found its origin in imitation of Egyptian 
work ; and here, again, he was only anticipating 
the recognition of the fact that the colonnades 
of Der el-Bahri approach nearer to the style of 
Greek work than almost any other work in Egypt. 

Nearly thirty years after the first French 
explorers, and shortly after the visit of 
Champollion, Wilkinson surveyed the ruins, and 
apparently saw, not only the ramps of approach 


“SNIWNTIOO JIXMOd-OLOUd . 1SHVS-Ie AAG “AGCVNNOIOO, HIMON “OT 


Cuts a) 








WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES — 93 


to the courts, but also one of the pillared corridors 
whose walls were covered with sculptures of 
soldiers carrying boughs and weapons, and with a 
scene representing the dedication of two obelisks 
to Amen. His reading of the name of the builder 
of the temple, Amunneitgori, or Amun-noo- 
het, was no nearer to the truth than that of 
Champollion, though he saw that the French 
scholar’s unknown 'Thothmes was no other than 
Thothmes II. 

Lepsius, who evidently saw more of the temple 
than any of his predecessors, was the first to make 
a real approach to the true reading of its builder’s 
name. His version of the name, ‘““ Numt Amen,” 
was indeed an almost correct reading of part of 
Hatshepsut’s title, Khnum Amen ; and he con- 
jectured that she was the eldest sister of 
Thothmes III, who occupied the throne during 
the minority of her brother, but was not permitted 
to rank in the regular lists of the kings of Egypt. 

In 1858 the indefatigable Mariette visited the 
temple, and added it to the thirty-six other sites 
at which he carried on excavations during his 
thirty years of ceaseless toil. He was too busy 
with other work at Qurneh to give to Der el-Bahri 
the attention which it deserved, and his work 
there was carried on only with a small staff, and 
for a short time, though he worked again at the 
place in 1862 and 1866. Nor were his methods 
here such as to be helpful to his successors. 
Working, as he did all his lifetime, under the 
lash, as it were, and with the need of getting 
the largest possible results with the smallest 
expenditure of money and time, it was impossible 


94 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


for him to make his clearances thorough and 
methodical. Indeed, he seriously added to the 
difficulties of subsequent excavators by the fact 
that instead of removing the rubbish of his 
excavations completely outside the probable 
limits of the temple, he was forced by stress of 
time and want of money simply to dump his 
waste on the nearest convenient spot within the 
temple area. ‘The consequence was that when 
Naville came to make the systematic clearance 
of the whole building, he found several of the 
most important chambers completely buried, 
not only beneath the debris of the centuries, but 
beneath that also which Mariette had heaped on 
the top of everything. 

All the same, it was Mariette who, as in so 
many other instances, first revealed to the world 
the real wonder of Der el-Bahri and the sur- 
passing interest of its sculptured halls. His was 
the first plan to give us anything like a true 
conception of the form of the temple, then held 
to be unique in Egyptian architecture; and 
though his restoration of the details, or rather 
the restoration of M. Brune, working on his 
material, was incorrect in several points, it was a 
good deal less so than some more pretentious 
attempts which succeeded it, and at least gave an 
impression intelligible, and in the main not very 
far from the actuality. 

It was to this first excavation of Mariette 
also that we owe what has ever since been the 
most picturesque, and not the least informing, 
of the treasures of Der el-Bahri—the wonderful 
series of reliefs representing the voyage of 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES — 95 


Hatshepsut’s squadron to Punt, which decorates 
the retaining wall terminating the middle platform 
of the temple. ‘This series of sculptures, one of 
the priceless treasures of New Empire Egyptian 
art, would of itself be the justification of Mariette’s 
work. 

In 1893 the Egypt Exploration Fund took 
up the great task of completely excavating Queen 
Hatshepsut’s temple, and their work, conducted 
by M. Edouard Naville and a number of 
assistants, only closed with the publication, in 
1908, of the sixth folio volume of plates and 
plans, completing, with the introductory memoir, 
a present-day memorial which even the great 
queen need not have disdained, and which is 
worthy of her fine achievement. By the patient 
efforts of M. Naville and his fellow-workers the 
long ramps and spacious courts of the temple 
were completely cleared of the rubbish of 
centuries, their graceful colonnades put in a 
condition of safety, and the priceless coloured 
reliefs roofed over so as to protect them from the 
ruinous effects of the weather, which, even in 
the period between the work of Mariette and that 
of the Egypt Exploration Fund, had wrought 
more damage to the wonderful series of scenes 
of the Expedition to Punt than had been done 
by all the centuries of neglect. 

Wisely the explorers made no attempt at 
restoration. Their aim was solely one of preserva- 
tion, and we owe to them the fact that the most 
interesting temple of the XVIIIth Dynasty is 
now in a condition which permits some realisation 
of its former beauty, and which promises its 


96 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


endurance for centuries to come. Thanks to 
the explorers’ labours, and to the complete view 
of the building which we owe to Mr. Somers 
Clarke, the memorial temple of Egypt’s greatest 
queen is now as well known in all its essential 
features as almost any structure in the world. 

The work at Der el-Bahri, however, only 
ended in one aspect to beginin another. Already 
in 1879 Mariette, to whose instinct for the 
possibilities of the various Egyptian sites full 
justice has never been done, had declared his 
belief, founded on his discovery of a block of 
stone bearing the name of King Mentuhotep 
Neb-hepet-Ra of the XIth Dynasty, and of 
several fragments of columns, that a small temple 
of the XIth Dynasty had once existed not far 
from Hatshepsut’s great temple. In 1903, after 
the completion of the actual work of excavation 
at the great temple, M. Naville began the excava- 
tion of the large mounds to the south of the site 
of his former labours, and with the assistance of 
Dr. H. R. Hail and others, the work was carried 
on till 1907, the final volume of results being 
published in 1913. 

The work began, as M. Naville tells us, 
chiefly with the view of clearing the XIth Dynasty 
cemetery which the explorer was convinced lay 
beneath the great mounds of rubbish; but the 
cemetery soon proved to be less, and other 
objects more, important than had been antici- 
pated. Ere long the diggers made out the line 
of a ramp, running parallel to the outer wall of 
Hatshepsut’s temple, and, following up the 
traces of building which successively revealed 


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WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES _ 97 


themselves, as the mounds, often from 15 to 
20 feet in height, were cleared away, they at last 
completely unearthed the remains of a building 
which is as unique in the history of Egyptian 
architecture as Hatshepsut’s temple was formerly 
thought to be. ‘The temple was at an early stage 
found to belong, as Mariette had suggested, to 
the XIth Dynasty, and to be the work of one of 
the greatest kings of this little-known line of 
rulers, the Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra who has 
already been mentioned. 

It is by no means in such good preservation 
as its great companion, for about the end of the 
XIXth Dynasty it appears to have been definitely 
abandoned as a temple, and handed over to the 
tender mercies of the masons who used it as a 
convenient quarry for material. Nothing is now 
standing above ro feet from the pavement level, 
and none of the pillars are above 7 feet in 
height. Yet the remains are sufficiently complete 
to allow of the understanding of the appearance 
which the whole must have presented in the days 
when Hatshepsut’s architect took its platform 
and colonnades as the inspiration of the great 
work on which he was engaged at its side. 

At the end of a spacious enclosure, bounded 
by a double temenos wall of which the outer 
member was of brick and the inner of limestone, 
a broad ramp, sloping somewhat steeply, rose to 
the level of a rectangular platform. The retaining 
wall of the platform was faced, as in the later 
temple, with a colonnade consisting of a double 
row of pillars square on plan. The platform 
itself was surrounded by a double range of 

G 


98 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


similar square pillars, which was roofed over, 
and made a kind of veranda completely enclosing 
the central mass of the temple. In the centre of 
this colonnade, a door, curiously narrow and 
paltry for so fine a building (it is only 3 feet wide), 
gave access to an almost square hypostyle hall, 
whose roof was supported by a perfect forest of 
octagonal columns ranged on three sides in three 
rows, and on the fourth, at the back of the hall, 
in two. In the centre of this hall, and probably 
with a narrow open space between it and the 
innermost row of columns, rose the unique 
feature of the temple—-2 *ectangular mass of 
rubble faced with hewn . -ne, and surmounted 
by a pyramid of similar materials. Behind the 
pyramid, and against the wall which separated 
the pyramid-court from the rear portion of the 
temple, were several shrines, corresponding to 
certain tombs in the court beyond. 

Passing through another granite doorway, of 
the same meagre proportions as the one in the 
front of the hall, the visitor entered an open 
court surrounded by a colonnade of octagonal 
columns, two deep on the southern side, but 
single on the east and west. In the midst of 
this court the mouth of a sloping passage, which 
descended for 150 metres to the rock-hewn 
sanctuary, lined with granite and furnished with 
an alabaster shrine, where the Ka of King 
Mentuhotep was worshipped, formed a strange 
and impressive feature. Beyond the open court 
stood another hypostyle hall, with eight rows of 
octagonal columns, ten deep, and, last of all, a 
passage, bounded by two walls which reached 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES — 99 


from the seventh of the two central rows of 
columns in the hall, led to a tiny sanctuary hewn 
out of the cliff behind the temple. 

Such was the temple of Mentuhotep as 
excavation has revealed it to us—undoubtedly a 
most interesting memorial of Middle Kingdom 
architecture, and most important as being by far 
the most complete example which has survived 
of the work of that period. Probably we should 
have thought the dominant feature of the building, 
the central pyramid, rather an incongruity than 
otherwise, and evidently Senmut, when he came 
to his great task six hundred years later, thought 
so too, for he adopted the ideas of his prede- 
cessor in other respects, but discarded what 
seems to us the clumsy pyramid block altogether. 
One thing, however, Senmut could not do. He 
could not secure for his splendid design anything 
like the fineness of masonry which Mentuhotep’s 
architect had been able to compass in the older 
temple. The XVIIIth Dynasty builders, clever 
though they were in many respects, left poor 
work behind them compared with the magnificent 
masonry of the XIth Dynasty men. 

One of the most interesting features of the 
older building was found in the six shrines which 
have been already mentioned. They belonged 
to certain princesses, Aashait, Sadhe, Kauit, 
Kemsit, and Henhenit, with one unnamed, who 
were also priestesses. ‘These shrines were in 
connection with the tombs of the ladies in 
question, who were buried within \the temple. 

The building had been completed before 
either the tombs or the shrines were inserted ; 


100 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


and the inference has been drawn that these were 
the ladies of the harem who were chosen for the 
honour of accompanying King Mentuhotep on 
his voyage through the Underworld to the regions 
of the blessed—in other words, who were killed 
at his funeral so that he should not lack company 
in the world of the dead. ‘The survival to so late 
a period of this barbarous custom is not proved, 
though it has been suggested that it continued 
even as late as the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty; 
but at all events the shrines of the princesses 
have furnished us with some fine examples of the 
work of the little-known XIth Dynasty. 

In the extreme north corner of the temple, 
Thothmes III intruded another shrine to the 
goddess Hathor, which was discovered during 
the progress of the excavations in February, 1906, 
and has provided us with one of the most admir- 
able examples extant of Egyptian sculpture. The 
shrine is a small chamber, 10 feet long and 8 feet 
high, hewn in the rock and lined with sandstone. 
The slabs are sculptured with religious scenes 
in which 'Thothmes III makes offerings to Hathor. 
The goddess herself stood in the centre of the 
shrine in the shape of a life-sized figure of a 
cow, suckling a kneeling figure of a king, while 
another royal figure stands in front under her 
head. ‘The name of Amenhotep II is attached to 
these figures; but the probability is that they 
were meant to represent Thothmes III, who 
dedicated the chapel, and that all that 
Amenhotep II had to do with the act of piety 
was the engraving of his cartouche on his father’s 
work. The Hathor cow of Der el-Bahri is 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES tor 


quite one of the masterpieces of New Empire 
art, quite eclipsing the famous example of the 
same figure which has come from the Saite 
period and has hitherto been esteemed one of the 
finest specimens of Egyptian animal sculpture. 
“Neither Greece nor Rome,” says Maspero of 
the Der el-Bahri cow, “ has left us anything that 
can be compared with it ; we must go to the great 
sculptors of animals of our own day to find an 
equally realistic piece of work.” Indeed the 
Hathor cow and the two lions of Amenhotep III 
and Tutankhamen, now in the British Museum, 
might be safely taken as the pieces on which 
Egyptian sculpture might elect to stand as an 
interpreter of animal figure. 

Such, then, have been the main results of 
excavation on a single Egyptian site; surely 
enough to afford ample justification of the 
expenditure of time and money and labour which 
has been involved. Two great temples have 
been given back to the knowledge of the world— 
one of them, it is true, from a period otherwise 
fairly well known, the other from a period which 
was hitherto almost a blank. Even in the case 
of the later temple, where the results contained 
no surprises, and only extended our already 
existing knowledge, the contribution of this site 
to our estimate of Egyptian art was of surpassing 
value ; while Mentuhotep’s temple has filled a 
gap at one of the points where further knowledge 
of Egyptian history and art was most to be 
desired. 

There have been no marvels of buried treasure 
to gild the pages of the story of excavation at 


102 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


Der el-Bahri; but there has been a solid addition 
to the sum of human knowledge of the past. 
Ata score of other sites, work similar to that which 
has just been described has been continually 
going on during the last thirty years. Mariette’s 
beginnings of clearance at sites such as Edfu, 
Esneh, Denderah, and Abydos have been followed 
by work whose thoroughness has been such as 
Mariette, from the nature of the case, could never 
' have accomplished. To tell the story of excava- 
tion, even in the most meagre outline, would take 
a volume instead of a chapter, and Der el-Bahri 
must suffice as a typical example of the kind of 
work which has been done all up and down the 
land of Egypt. 

Reference must be made, however, to one 
piece of work, associated, curiously enough, also 
with the name of the explorer of Der el-Bahri, 
which has a unique interest of its own. This is 
the discovery of the Pool of Osiris, which, as 
Strabo told us, lay beneath the great temple, 
or, as he called it, the Memnonium, at Abydos. 
In 1914 M. Naville, following up the work of 
Miss M. A. Murray and Professor Petrie in 
1902-3, found a great underground chamber, 
100 feet by 60 feet, constructed of huge blocks 
of limestone, cased inside with hard red sand- 
stone. The pillars, the architraves, and the 
roofing-blocks of the aisles of this chamber were 
all of fine granite, without adornment or inscrip- 
tion, and in fact resembled almost exactly the 
similar work in the so-called “ Temple of the 
Sphinx” at Gizeh, with this difference, that 
whereas the granite pillars of the Temple of the 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 103 


Sphinx are 3 feet square, those of the chamber 
at Abydos are 8} feet square. The wonder of 
the building, however, was its arrangement. In 
the centre of the chamber stood two rows of 
these great granite monoliths, each row consisting 
of five pillars. Around the central block of 
masonry on which these pillars rested, ran a deep 
channel, which had manifestly once been filled 
with water, so as to render the central block an 
island. 

Around this channel runs a ledge of stonework 
about 3 feet wide, and from this ledge access 
is given to a set of seventeen cells each about 
6 feet square and 6 feet high. 

Manifestly this extraordinary building is 
Strabo’s “‘ well,’ which, as he tells us, was below 
the temple, and was built like the Labyrinth, 
only on a smaller scale, with passages covered 
by a single stone. What may have been its use 
it is as yet impossible to say. ‘The water channel 
and the ledge round it suggest that the boat of 
Osiris may have been towed around the pool 
by his priests on the great feast-days, or when 
the Passion Play of Abydos, representing the 
death and resurrection of Osiris, was being 
celebrated. ‘Two things alone seem certain, the 
first, the identity of the chamber with the pool 
described by the old geographer, and the second, 
that we have here one of the most ancient sacred 
buildings in Egypt. 

Other parts of the structure are the work of 
the XIXth Dynasty, which did so much at 
Abydos, and bear the cartouche of Merenptah 
and representations of this king worshipping the 


104 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


gods; but the chamber of the pool is another 
matter. Its construction is of such a character 
as to refer it at once to a very much earlier date ; 
and there can be little doubt that the resemblance 
to the Temple of the Sphinx is only the evidence 
of the fact that the two buildings are of the same 
period, and that the Pool of Osiris is the earliest 
Egyptian building of any size known, apart from 
the pyramids. 

The magnificence of its masonry shows how 
far the Egyptians of this early period had already 
carried the system of construction which they 
were to use to such splendid purpose in the great 
temples of the land. Never again, however, 
even in the great days of New Empire building, 
did they put together such a piece of sumptuous 
massiveness as the underground chamber of 
Osiris at Abydos. | 

Another aspect of work among the temples 
must be referred to, as being, in its own way, not 
less important than the rescuing of the actual 
structures from obscurity and neglect ; and that 
is the interpretation of the work thus rescued, 
the tracing of its history, and the disentangling 
of the various periods of building which are 
represented, and the different hands which have 
been at work in the completion of a building 
whose history as a growing organism may stretch 
through centuries, and involve the activities of 
half a dozen dynasties. 

To make the temples intelligible is a matter 
scarcely less important than to make them 
visible, and it has involved scarcely less effort. 
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WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 105 


this direction, a great Egyptian temple such as 
Karnak remains a_ sufficiently complicated 
business to bewilder the ordinary sight-seer and 
make him turn with relief to the clarity of 
Greek architecture; but at least it is now 
possible to arrive at something like an under- 
standing of how the vast bulk of Karnak grew, 
century after century, to what we now see, and 
to realise a little of the romance of history which 
is involved in the succession of Pharaohs who 
have laboured to make great and splendid the 
holy and beautiful house of Amen in Thebes. 
Let us turn, then, to Karnak, and try to see 
a little of what modern work has done in the 
direction of making this vastest of extant Egyptian 
temples intelligible. A century ago, Belzoni 
wandered round the ruins of the great temple, 
his mind filled with vague dreams of Memnon, 
Osymandias, and Psammethes, perhaps as 
appreciative of the wonder of what he saw as 
the most enlightened of his successors, but 
absolutely in the dark as to the significance of 
what he saw, or the history of how the great 
building had been reared; to-day the story 
of Karnak is practically as well understood as 
that of one of our European cathedrals, and 
anyone who likes to take the trouble may trace 
out the evidence of its age-long growth. Indeed 
it is difficult for the modern to realise how 
lengthy is the story which unfolds itself in the 
sculptured stones of the great temple. We think 
with something like awe of the long process 
which reared some of our cathedrals, and which 
may, perhaps, have lasted for a century, or 


1066 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


perhaps, in an extreme case, for two ; but Karnak 
was a growing organism for a period of time more 
than twice as long, not only as any of our cathe- 
drals took in the building, but twice as long as 
any of them have been standing. ‘Towards the 
eastern end of the vast complex of Karnak there 
are still to be seen the scanty relics of the earliest 
builders of the temple of whom we have any 
knowledge—the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, who 
began their work at Karnak certainly not much 
later than 2000 B.c. On the western face of the 
great temple is the Pylon of the Ptolemies, whose 
dynasty only closed with the subjection of Egypt 
to Roman rule in 30 B.c. Karnak, in other words, 
was building for a period which was certainly 
not less than seventeen hundred years, and which 
may have been almost two thousand! Such a 
consideration makes our ideas as to duration 
seem very small indeed. 

Nor has the work been less complicated than 
it has been lengthy. Practically every Pharaoh 
worth naming has left his mark on the great 
building in some form or another, and often 
the work of the reigning king was done without 
the slightest regard to that of his forerunners ; 
sometimes, indeed, with the deliberate design 
of obscuring it and blotting out its memory. 
Consequently the task of disentangling the story 
of Karnak has been no easy one. It has been 
like the reading of a manuscript where interpola- 
tions of different writers, dealing with different 
matters, continually break the thread of the main 
narrative, and where, to add to the confusion, 
part of the writing is a palimpsest, written over 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 107 


the faded script of an earlier author. Along with 
the difficulty of interpreting the story of the 
various buildings has gone that of preserving 
them from destruction. 

One of the curious facts about Egyptian 
building is that, for a race of master-builders 
such as they showed themselves to be, they were 
strangely, even culpably careless about their 
foundations. If the mighty halls which they 
reared had been built on such foundations as 
modern builders would insist on for even much 
less important structures, there seems no reason 
why, short of deliberate destruction by the hand 
of man, the Egyptian temples should not stand 
practically for ever. But the Egyptian architect 
was content to pile walls and colonnades which are 
the wonder of the world on the most flimsy 
‘foundations, and his work is in most cases literally 
a house built on the sand. 

The wonder is, not that there have been 
occasional collapses, but that the buildings have 
stood so long as they have ; indeed nothing but 
their sheer mass and weight has enabled them to 
endure. Even so, earth-tremors, and the constant 
and insidious work of infiltration, have worked 
havoc on the badly founded buildings, and were 
it not for the constant care devoted to them, 
and the work of practically refounding them 
which has been carried out, the great halls of 
Karnak would ere long be only masses of tumbled 
ruin. There is nothing dramatic about the work 
of either the interpreter or the preserver ; neither 
can point, in general, to any treasure-trove which 
has resulted from his efforts, though occasionally, 


108 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


as notably in connection with the work of 
M. Legrain at Karnak, the work of preservation 
has resulted in the unearthing of a mass of the 
most wonderful ancient statuary. But we owe 
the double fact that Karnak stands to-day and 
is likely to stand for centuries to come, and that 
its vast complex of building is intelligible, to 
many years of quiet and unobtrusive work on 
the part of scholars and architects. 

In the great days of Egypt’s glory under the 
New Empire, Thebes must have been one of 
the wonder-cities of the world, and one of the 
fairest sights on which the sun ever shone. It 
may be that Babylon, in the short-lived glory of 
the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, 
was vaster in extent, and the German excavations 
have taught us how gorgeous were some of the 
great buildings of the city, with their facings of 
enamelled brick and their wealth of colour; 
but it may be questioned if even Babylon could 
show anything to match the solemn splendour 
of Karnak or Luxor. and beside the ordered 
sumptuousness of ti huge Egyptian temples, 
with their wonders of ‘egalithic construction, one 
imagines that Babylon's glories would have seemed 
rather cheap and tav’ ~. And of all the glories 
of Thebes, Karnak v’ ; tne centre and crown. 

Petrie tells us that the pitiful remains of the 
Labyrinth, the great temple of Amenemhat III 
of the XIIth Dynasty, show that it was big 
enough to hold all the temples of Karnak and 
Luxor put together; but the imagination is 
scarcely capable of trying to comprehend the 
extent of such a building, and. Karnak is quite 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES tog 


big enough for most people. The actual area 
of its buildings is about equal to that of St. Peter’s 
(Rome), Milan, and Nétre Dame (Paris) ; while 
the sacred enclosure, the Cathedral Close, so to 
speak, would hold another half-dozen of the 
biggest cathedrals of Europe, without crowding 
them unduly. 

Let us try to imagine ourselves visiting the 
great temple in the days when it had reached its 
greatest extent, though, by that time, the glory 
of ‘Thebes had in great measure departed. Still 
the building, as we now see it, was practically 
completed only in the days of the Ptolemies, and 
no survey of it would be adequate without 
including their work. Unfortunately in taking 
the temple in the natural order of approach, by 
its west front, so to speak, we reverse almost 
exactly the order of its building, which was, 

generally speaking, from east to west. Yet the 
_ history of the building is sufficiently intelligible 
even when thus taken in reverse order, and 
though there are other approaches to Karnak, 
and the approach by either the Eastern or the 
Western Avenue of Sphinxes must have been very 
impressive, yet the main front of the temple must 
_ always have been that which faced the Nile, in 
the termination of the axis of the whole structure. 
No doubt also the Egyptian Kings, with their 
fondness for using their great river as the scene 
of ceremonial processions, used the western front 
of the temple for their visits to the shrine of 
Amen. 

We land, then, at a quay of hewn stone, 
adorned with two small obelisks of Sety II of the 


110 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


XIXth Dynasty, and with two statues of couchant 
lions. Passing down a short and gentle slope, 
we move along a broad paved way between rows 
of couchant ram-headed sphinxes, which were 
placed here by Ramses II. The path extends 
for 200 feet, and leads up to the vastest portal to 
be found even in this land of vast portals. This is 
the First Pylon of Karnak—first in point of 
approach, but last in point of erection, for it is 
the work of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs who grasped 
the sceptre of Egypt after the death of Alexander 
the Great ; and indeed, as you can see, the work 
is not yet complete. Building is still going on, 
and the ramps of crude brick by which the great 
stones are dragged up to their positions are still 
heaped against the walls, where they will continue 
to stand for more than two thousand years. 

The pylon itself is gigantic. The breadth 
of the west front of St. Paul’s, the greatest 
building familiar to English minds, is 179 feet, 
and its height, to the top of the statue of St. Paul 
on the pediment, is 135 feet. ‘The Pylon of the 
Ptolemies measures 370 feet in breadth, or rather 
more than double St. Paul’s, while its height is 
1424 feet, so that it overtops St. Paul’s head by 
74 feet. In addition its walls are 49 feet thick. 
No mightier approach to a temple was ever 
devised. 

Passing through this great gateway we find 
ourselves in an open court whose dimensions 
are worthy of the portal which gave access to it. 
From the gateway where you stand to the 
scarcely less imposing pylon of Ramses I, which 
faces you across the open space, this court 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES rr 


measures 275 feet, while its breadth is 338 feet. 
The area of St. Paul’s is 84,000 square feet, so 
that this single court of Karnak exceeds our great 
cathedral in area by 8000 square feet. Around 
its walls runs a colonnade of single columns. 
In the north corner of the court there stands a 
little grey sandstone temple, divided into three 
chapels, which are dedicated to Amen, Mut, and 
Khonsu, the members of the Theban Triad. 
The southern colonnade is broken bythe intruding 
front of a larger temple. This is the temple of 
Ramses III, the last of the great warrior kings of 
Egypt, who saved the land, in the degenerate 
days of the XXth Dynasty, from being overrun 
and ravaged by the raid of the Sea-Peoples. His 
temple, though very modest in size (it measures 
only 170 feet in length), is important as giving 
one of the most perfect examples extant of a 
complete Egyptian temple, built from start to 
finish by one monarch, and on a straightforward 
and homogeneous plan. 

The great court which has taken these two 
lesser buildings into its sweep was the work of 
the Libyan Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, 
who held their court at Bubastis, and is therefore 
often called the Court of the Bubastites. The 
temple of Ramses III was cleared of rubbish in 
1896-7 by M. Legrain, in the course of his 
great work at Karnak. Down the central avenue 
of the Bubastite court the Ethiopian Pharaohs 
of the XXVth Dynasty began the erection of 
a colonnade whose purpose has not been quite 
determined. As they left it, it consisted of a 
double range of huge columns, five in each row. 


112 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


Of the ten, only one solitary survivor now stands, 
and is known as the Column of Taharqa, after 
the Ethiopian king who was responsible for its 
erection, and for some of the sorest disasters of 
Egypt in her declining days. It was ‘Taharga 
and his successor ‘Tanutamen who brought down 
upon Egypt the wrath of the Assyrian conqueror, 
Ashurbanipal, whose ruthless soldiery by the 
sack of ‘Thebes dealt the imperial city a blow from 
which she never recovered. Taharga’s column 
stands as the memorial of a man who “ began to 
build, and was not able to finish ” in more senses 
than one. 

Leaving the court for a moment by the portal 
in the south-east corner, we find on the wall of 
the second pylon one of the most interesting 
records of the temple. This is the inscription 
in which Sheshanq, one of the Libyan Pharaohs, 
records the triumph of that campaign in Syria 
in the course of which he humbled the pride of 
Rehoboam of Judah, and robbed Solomon’s 
temple of all the riches which the wise king had 
accumulated. In Sheshanq’s relief a gigantic 
figure of Amen leads up before the now vanished 
figure of the king five rows of captive towns of 
Palestine, each represented by a circular wall 
enclosing its name, from which emerges the upper 
part of a bound prisoner. 

Before us, as we return to the great court, 
rises the second pylon, the work of Ramses I, 
the founder of the XIXth Dynasty. Scarcely 
any part of the temple is more eloquent of the 
jumble of times, and kings, and even faiths, 
which goes to make up Karnak, than the 





1 ope LACEUING AKG ee NAGY 1 © Dae Vib © Srna ir Eas EL Ave Ie. 





WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 113 


neighbourhood of this pylon. The great gateway 
itself is of Ramses I; but its materials had their 
own story before he built them into his new 
approach to the temple of Amen, and had served 
another god ; for some of the blocks of the pylon 
once belonged to one of the heretical temples of 
Akhenaten, and bear his name and those of his 
successors, Tutankhamen and Ay. The little 
vestibule before the pylon is flanked by statues 
of Ramses I] ; but within the doorway are found 
the cartouches of Ramses I and Sety II, as well 
as that of Ramses II, while part of the vestibule 
is the work of two of the Ptolemies. Thus in 
this little space the work of no fewer than eight 
Pharaohs, covering a period of more than a 
thousand years, is represented. 

The gateway of Ramses I gives access to what 
is perhaps the most remarkable, though by no 
means the most beautiful, of the halls of Karnak. 
The Hypostyle Hall, one of the hugest of human 
creations, was, like so much else at Karnak, the 
work of several sovereigns, though in this case the 
completion of the building was not so very long 
protracted as in some other instances. ‘The hall 
was begun by Ramses I, whose short reign of 
two years only enabled him to see the work 
started. The greater part of the hall as we now 
see it is the work of Sety I, one of the finest of 
Egyptian Pharaohs, whose work everywhere is 
in accordance with the nobility of his face as it 
can be seen at Cairo. 

Sety carried out the erection of what is by 
far the most imposing feature of the hall, the 
nave, with its double row of gigantic open-flower 

H 


114 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


columns, the largest in existence. Each of the 
twelve tremendous columns is 69 feet in height 
and 33 feet in circumference, while the spread- 
ing capitals, 11 feet in height, have an area large 
enough for one hundred men to stand upon. 
Imagine twelve versions of the Trajan Column 
at Rome, or the Vendéme Column at Paris, facing 
one another in two rows and supporting gigantic 
architraves of sixty to a hundred tons in weight, 
which in their turn support the great roofing-slabs. 
These form the central avenue of the great hall. 
On either side of them the papyrus-bud columns 
of the two side aisles rise to a height of 424 feet. 
The rows nearest to the central avenue on either 
side bear above their architraves rectangular 
pillars which make up the difference between the 
height of the side columns and those of the 
centre, and which bear the extremities of the roof 
of the nave with its cornice. On the lower level 
of the side pillars, the roof of the hall continues 
over the rest of the area, supported by a forest 
of one hundred and twenty-two columns. 

Sety I is responsible for the whole of the 
northern half of the hall, as weil as for the central 
avenue, so that the southern portion of the 
building is all that Ramses II can claim as his 
work, if indeed even this part was not erected 
by his father, and only sculptured by him. 
Ramses II, however, had the knack of securing 
to himself the glory of work which was done by 
other men, and to most people the great Hypostyle 
Hall of Karnak is his work, though he had really 
very little to do with it. 

The architectural merits of the huge building 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 115 


are undoubted, up to a certain point; but its 
faults are equally unquestionable. Mere size 
tells here, as indeed it almost always does, unless 
its impression is spoilt by sheer incapacity. 
There can be no question of the impressiveness 
of the great building. ‘The central avenue, with 
its soaring columns, and its grated clerestory 
rising above the roofs of the side-aisles, is the 
prototype of all subsequent cathedral archi- 
tecture. But the side-aisles do not add to the 
dignity of the great chamber. ‘Their forest of 
squat, shapeless columns, instead of being impres- 
sive, is only bewildering. Here, very certainly, 
you cannot see the wood for the trees, and the 
spaciousness of the hall 1s quite destroyed by the 
multitude of the supports of its roof. “‘ The size 
that strikes us,’ says Professor Petrie, “‘is not 
the grandeur of strength, but the bulkiness of 
disease.” 

The outer walls of the great hall are sculptured 
with reliefs representing the wars of its two 
creators. ‘The north wall bears a fine series of 
scenes, covering over 200 feet of surface, in which 
the wars of Sety I are depicted with great spirit. 
In some later instances such war-reliefs are 
merely wearisome; but these of Sety are both 
vivacious and well-executed, and such scenes as 
that of the king smiting the Libyans are among the 
best examples of work in this kind, and infinitely 
superior to the pretentious work of his son. 
The southern wall has reliefs of Ramses II, his 
eternal Battle of Kadesh, which he could never 
forget, or allow anyone else to forget, a copy of 
the treaty of peace with the Hittites, and the 


116 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


so-called Poem of Pentaur, in which the king’s 
valour at Kadesh is celebrated. 

Behind the Hypostyle Hall comes the 
IlIrd Pylon, which was reared by the most 
magnificent, if not the greatest, of Egyptian 
Pharaohs, the gorgeous Amenhotep II], in whose 
glittering reign the glories of the New Empire 
seemed to culminate, before the shadows of his 
son’s ill-starred attempt at religious reform 
dimmed their splendour. When Thebes was 
at the height of its fame, and when all the kings 
of the ancient east were sending their ambas- 
sadors to the great city to fall “ seven times and 
seven times ”’ in the dust before the golden sandals 
of the man who was God visible on earth to a 
great part of the ancient world, this third pylon 
was the main front of the great ‘heban temple, 
which then occupied not much more than half 
the space which it now covers. Its western face 
was used by Sety as the back wall of the Hypostyle 
Hall; but on the northern tower on the eastern 
side can still be seen the faint remains of a great 
scene in which a royal procession on the Nile in 
honour of Amen is depicted. One great ship 
over 40 feet long has the king standing on the 
poop, and cabins with cornices amidships. 
Thirty or forty rowers urge it along, and it 
tows behind it the sacred barge of Amen, which 
bears in a shrine a small processional bark of the 
god, and at the bow a sphinx and an altar. 

Besides his pylon, Amenhotep wrought a vast 
amount of work at Karnak ; but it was not, like 
that of Sety and Ramses, concentrated in a single 
great structure, but dispersed in various parts 





I4. KARNAK, COLUMNS OF THE SIDE-AISLE, HYPOSTYLE HALL. 







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WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 117 


of the sacred enclosure, and so does not produce 
the same effect. To see the work of Amenhotep 
on a scale worthy of his importance in the line 
of Egyptian Pharaohs, you have to go to Luxor 
with its fine papyrus-bud forecourt, and its 
noble nave, which, had it been finished, would 
have almost rivalled the Hypostyle Hall of the 
later kings in size and exceeded it in beauty ; 
or to try to think back the vanished glories of 
what was probably the most gorgeous and 
beautiful of all the Theban temples—the Funerary 
temple of Amenhotep, which was destroyed, not 
by the Assyrian conqueror, but by the royal 
vandals of the XI Xth Dynasty, Ramses II and his 
son Merenptah. 

All the same, Amenhotep accomplished no 
small amount of work, in one way and another, 
within the enclosure of Karnak. Just beyond 
the girdle-wall of the great temple on the north 
side, he built a temple to Mentu, the Theban 
War-God, with a pylon, and obelisks of red 
granite. ‘This temple once contained statues in 
black granite of the king, and of the goddess 
Sekhmet, towards whom he evidently cherished 
a feeling of deep devotion, if we may judge by 
the number of statues to her which he dedicated 
in the temple of Mut. 

The temple of Mentu shared the usual fate of 
Amenhotep’s work, and was meddled with by 
Merenptah, Ramses V, and at least four of the 
Ptolemies, a fair specimen of the fashion in which 
the history of Karnak is complicated by the 
multitude of superimposed strata, or rather of 
interwoven strands, with which you have to do. 


118 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


On the south side, and just at the girdle-wall, 
stands the beautiful temple of Khonsu (the son 
of the Theban 'Triad), one of the finest examples 
of a complete Egyptian temple of normal form. 
This is not the work of Amenhotep, but of 
Ramses III; but apparently an earlier temple of 
Amenhotep must have once occupied the site, 
for the king set up before the gateway a noble 
avenue of one hundred and twenty-two sandstone 
sphinxes bearing his name. Beyond the wall, 
and approached by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, 
lies another of Amenhotep’s contributions to 
the glories of Karnak—the temple of Mut, the 
mother-goddess of the Theban Triad, which 
was excavated in 1895-7 by two English ladies, 
Miss Margaret Benson and Miss Janet Gourlay. 
It is full of Sekhmet statues, and behind it lies 
a sacred lake, shaped like a horse-shoe. 

But the following out of the work of 
Amenhotep has drawn us away from our main 
quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. 
Returning to the great temple by the eastern 
avenue of sphinxes, we pass the girdle-wall by a 
pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of 
a temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had 
reared in ‘Thebes to his new deity the Aten. 
Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a 
manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed 
to promote peace in the state after the religious 
troubles of Akhenaten’s times. The square 
court behind the pylon has on its east side the 
ruins of a small temple of Amenhotep II, and the 
walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb. 
Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 119 


condition, closes the court on the north side, and 
passing through it we are faced by one of the 
most ancient parts of the whole building, the 
pylon of Queen Hatshepsut. ‘The pylon bears 
witness both to what Professor Breasted calls 
“the Feud of the Thutmosids,”’ and to the 
religious strifes of the XVIIIth Dynasty, for 
Hatshepsut’s name was erased from her reliefs 
by Thothmes I], and all allusions to Amen were 
scrupulously removed by Akhenaten, and restored 
by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut’s pylon we pass 
a pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and 
enemy, and traversing a court whose walls bear 
inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor 
of Ramses II, in which he describes his victories 
over the Libyans and the Peoples of the Mediter- 
ranean, we find ourselves back at the point from 
which our digression started, in the central court 
behind the great pylon of Amenhotep III. Here 
was the western front of the temple in the days of 
Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary 
remaining member of the quartette of obelisks 
with which this king and Thothmes IIT adorned 
the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins 
behind them. ‘The obelisks of the later king are 
both gone—the survivor of the pair of ‘Thothmes I 
is a fine shaft, 754 feet high. 

Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller 
one which he erected to the east, ‘Thothmes 
reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns 
of cedar wood ; but his work was not permitted 
to endure for long. It was within this hall that 
the priests of Amen arranged a little piece of 
play-acting in which the god Amen declared his 


120 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


preference for Thothmes III as king, and it was 
perhaps this unpalatable fact which determined 
Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece 
of vandalism which was to redound to her own 
glory. Anyhow, as the time for the celebration 
of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect, 
Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great 
shafts of granite for her jubilee obelisks, and when 
the tremendous blocks, 974 feet high, arrived, 
she stripped off the roof from part of her father’s 
hall and set them up there. Apart from the 
filial piety of such an act, the obelisks were things 
of which she might justly be proud. 

With the single exception of the stone, the 
work of her deadly enemy Thothmes III, which 
now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, 
and which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft 
of Hatshepsut, which still remains erect at Karnak, 
is the largest obelisk existing, and is more than 
20 feet higher than the so-called ‘‘ Cleopatra’s 
Needle,’ which represents to Londoners, as its 
twin does to the folk of New York, the skill of 
ancient Egypt. 

Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement 
that she caused the shafts to be engraved with an 
inscription in which she swears, “ As Ra loves 
me, as my father Amen favours me... as I 
shall be unto eternity like an Imperishable, as 
I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely 
these two great obelisks which My Majesty 
hath wrought with electrum for my father, Amen, 
in order that my name may abide in his temple, 
enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block 
of enduring granite, without seam or joining.” 


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WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 121 


She goes on to say, what is still more surprising, 
that the time occupied in the extraction and 
transportation of the mighty shafts was seven 
months ! 

When Thothmes III came to the throne, he 
showed his love for his distinguished relative by 
casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet with 
sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not Le 
read. As rulers, the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth 
Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very front 
rank; they cannot be said to have shone as 
exponents of family affection. 

To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I 
had another court, which was altered and added 
to by Thothmes III, who built also a small 
pylon in front of his Halls of Records, which 
come next in the great complex of building, 
jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which 
stand beside them. In the First Hall of Records 
stand the two pillars which strike everyone who 
sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and 
examples of a type not common in Egyptian work. 
They are of granite, the southern one carved with 
the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with the 
Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was 
turned into the chapel of the temple, in which 
the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidzus, at 
the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that 
one of the oldest and one of the newest parts of 
the building are here united. 

In the open space behind the chapel lie the 
scanty remains of the earliest Karnak known to 
us—that of the XIIth Dynasty. A few broken 
polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style, 


~ 


122 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


for the earliest parts of the great temple, with the 
work of the XIth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri; but 
it is impossible to say with the least approach to 
certainty what the first temple may have looked 
like. East again of these remnants comes the 
last important part of the vast building—the 
great Festal Temple of Thothmes III, with its 
fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and its eastern 
sanctuary and complex of store-chambers. 

The Festal Hall presents a feature unique 
in Egyptian Architecture. Its colonnade consists 
of thirty-two rectangular piers ranged round the 
sides, while down the centre of the hall run two 
rows of ten round columns, not spaced with the 
piers, and of extraordinary shape. Instead of 
tapering from the base to the top, their taper runs 
the opposite way, and their capitals are inverted, 
and present the appearance of a bell standing 
on its mouth. The downwards tapering column 
is, of course, a familiar feature in Minoan archi- 
tectural practice, and it is within the bounds 
of possibility that Thothmes’ columns are an 
Egyptian adaptation of a Minoan motive, for, 
as the tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara show, 
Minoan influence was at its height in the middle 
of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and intercourse between 
Crete and Egypt was frequent. Whether 
Thothmes owed the idea to some Minoan 
suggestion or not, it never established itself in 
Egypt. In Crete, with its regular use of wooden 
pillars resting on stone bases, the downward 
taper was quite natural; in Egypt, with a 
prevalent stone construction, it was an exotic, 
and could show no reason for its existence, and it 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 123 


was never repeated. One cannot say that its 
disappearance was any great loss to Egyptian 
architecture, for the effect of the inversion is 
singularly clumsy. 

We have thus traced the story of Karnak as 
one traverses the great temple from front to 
rear, and the bewildering complexity of the 
building is reflected in the variegated fabric of 
the narrative. ‘To call Karnak, as is often done, 
“the typical temple of the Egyptian Empire,” 
is to create an entire misapprehension in the 
mind of anyone who hears such a phrase used. 
Karnak is anything but a typical temple ; indeed 
it is not a temple, but rather an aggregate of many 
temples, and above everything else an epitome of 
Egyptian history for at least a millennium and a 
half. One would not even seek it for typical 
representatives of Egyptian architecture. Karnak, 
in this respect, possesses its beauties—and its 
monstrosities; but one would look rather to 
smaller specimens of the builder’s art for an 
adequate representation of Egyptian achievement 
in this respect. 

The great temple claims, and will always claim, 
our attention and wonder, by its sheer vastness, 
to begin with, for undoubtedly vastness has its 
own effect, though it is not the highest, in the 
elements of architectural impressiveness; then 
by the extraordinary way in which it presents a 
summary in stone of the vicissitudes of Egyptian 
history ; last, and perhaps least, by the surprising 
quality, and in some instances the beauty, of some 
of its detail. The main element in its appeal 
will always be wonder; admiration, and even 


124 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


that qualified by many reservations, is a bad 
second to the impression of simple amazement, 
that human hands and brains should have ever 
wrought so vast a thing. 

The preservation of the temple is, and will 
continue to be, a work almost as great, and as 
difficult, as its erection. It lies in the hands of 
the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a 
task as unending as the web of Penelope. 
Generally speaking, such work is of the kind 
which has to be its own reward, for it makes 
no appeal to the average visitor, who only sees 
that his enjoyment of this court or that is more 
or less hindered by the progress of work 
whose one merit is that it will keep safe for 
future generations priceless treasures which other- 
wise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, 
however, the work does bring other prizes in its 
train. 

Such was the case when, in November, 1903, 
M. Legrain, in the course of his work near the 
pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned 
to the central court after our digression to the 
south, found what has since been known as “ the 
Karnak Cachette,” a great pit full of pieces of 
sculpture of all types and periods. “‘ For a year 
and eight months,” wrote Maspero in February, 
1905, “‘ we have been fishing for statues in the 
Temple of Karnak. . . . Seven hundred stone 
monuments have already come out of the water, 
and we are not yet at theend. . . . Statues whole 
and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless 
bodies, bodiless heads, vases on which there were 
only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned, queens 


Il cdHLtOnNaWY fO LYnOoewoOs “MOKNT "OT 








WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 125 


standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals 
holding naos, or images of gods, in front of them, 
crouching, kneeling, sitting, found in all the 
attitudes of their profession or rank, in limestone, 
in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sand- 
stone, in green breccia, in schist, in alabaster— 
indeed, a whole population returns to the upper 
air and demands shelter in the galleries of the 
Museum.” 

The reason for the existence of this extra- 
ordinary dump of discarded sculpture, whose 
richness Maspero’s vivacious sentences do not 
in the least exaggerate, and which gave us, to 
mention only two examples, the masterly pink 
granite head of Senusert III, one of the most 
brilliant examples of XIIth Dynasty sculpture, 
and the schist Thothmes III, equally one of 
the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, 
seems to have been this. The Ptolemies, the 
presence of whose coins in the pit sufficiently 
dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, 
and in the course of their cleaning up of the 
places where they worked, they, no doubt, came 
on an infinity of out-of-date ex voto statues, some 
of them broken, some of them whole, but all 
rather a nuisance and obstruction, as the persons 
with whom they were associated had long since 
ceased to be of importance. What was to be 
done with them? They could not simply be 
thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedi- 
cated to the god, and were therefore sacred ; 
and they could not be allowed to stand littering 
up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily 
tidying. Accordingly the great pit was dug 


126 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 


within the sacred enclosure, and Senusert, 
Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old 
Egyptian notables were consigned to its muddy 
depths, thence to be resurrected, more than two 
thousand years later, by their degenerate descen- 
dants, who baled out the water from the pit with 
old petroleum cans, and hoisted Pharaoh, High- 
priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his 
dark resting-place with lever and tackle. It has 
been a fortunate chance for us, for Egyptian 
portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on 
the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the 
pit has yielded scores almost as good. 

The work of preserving the building, and 
putting it in acondition of safety for the future, 
has had a curious interest from the fact that in 
its progress Karnak has been to some extent 
rebuilt, and by exactly the same methods by 
means of which it was built in the beginning. 
For there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk 
about the wonderful mechanical knowledge of 
the ancient Egyptians, and their possession of 
secrets which have been lost to our time, that 
Karnak, like all the great Egyptian buildings, 
was built, not by means of any of these remarkable 
secrets which never existed save in the imagination 
of those who have talked about them, but by the 
disciplined and ordered use of the very simplest 
means known to man, the inclined plane, the 
lever, and any amount of obedient human 
muscle. These were the mechanical secrets 
which M. Legrain found most useful and most 
economical in the end of the nineteenth century 
A.D., as those who had gone before him had done 


WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 127 


in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth 
century B.c. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, 
Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa, Ptolemy, they 
all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour, 
disciplined and guided by a race of builders who 
for thousands of years had specialised in the 
training of men for such tasks, and with no more 
marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest 
of man’s mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the 
lever. M. Legrain has repeated their miracles 
with the same equipment; and in an age of 
machinery has shown that the human machine 
may still be the most adequate, the most adaptable, 
and the most economical. 

Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most 
interesting sites in Egypt, something of the 
work which has been going on with the double 
object of extending our knowledge of the past 
and of preserving its treasures for the future. 
Realising something of the importance of such 
buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their 
scores of companions throughout the land, 
buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt to 
us, one can feel that work such as that which has 
been meagrely described in these pages, un- 
spectacular though it may be compared with the 
work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and 
enduring importance, the indispensable fabric 
on which the glittering embroidery of the 
treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and 
elsewhere is wrought, and without whose rich 
and durable substance to form a background the 
golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half 
its meaning and beauty. 


CHAPTER VI 


BURIED ROYALTIES 


documents are the two papyri, the Abbott 

and the Amherst, which tell the story of 
the robberies of the royal tombs at Thebes, which 
came to light in the reign of Ramses 1X, about 
1100 B.c. At that time the capital city was ruled, 
under the Governor, by a certain noble named 
Paser, who was called “‘ 'The Prince of the Town.” 
Western Thebes, however, the City of the Dead, 
was not under the care of Paser, but was super- 
vised by another official named Pewero, who 
rejoiced in the title of “‘ Prince of the West.” 
Between the Prince of the ‘Town and the Prince 
of the West there was no love lost, as is not 
uncommon with the heads of two adjacent juris- 
dictions ; and Paser, on the eastern bank of the 
river, kept his ears open to all the tittle-tattle of 
discontented workmen from the Necropolis which 
drifted across the river. It so fell out in the 
sixteenth year of Ramses IX, that certain thefts 
from the Necropolis were reported by the Prince 
of the West to the Governor ; and Paser seized 
the opportunity of making the most to the Council 
of the laxity of administration which allowed 

128 


A MONG the most curious of ancient Egyptian 


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BURIED ROYALTIES 129 


such things, and of suggesting that infinitely 
worse robberies, involving the Royal Tombs, 
were occurring under his enemy’s jurisdiction. 

A special commission was appointed to 
investigate the charges, and the importance of the 
case is shown by the rank of the members of 
the court. These were Khaemuas, the Governor, 
‘The Royal Vassal Nesamen, Scribe of Pharaoh,” 
1.e. the King’s private Secretary, and “‘ The Royal 
Vassal Neferkara-em-per-Amen, the Speaker of 
Pharaoh,” doubtless the King’s Public Orator. 
This august court went at great length into the 
charges, and it is impossible to read the account 
of the case without feeling that Paser had right 
on his side, though he rather made a bungle of 
his case. Obviously his information was mainly 
derived from ill-natured gossip, for it was so 
inaccurate in detail that the very royal tomb 
which he positively declared to have been robbed 
was found on examination to be untouched ; 
but equally obviously there was a great deal 
going on in the Necropolis which should not 
have gone on, and Pewero either connived at the 
thefts or was culpably careless. 

On the whole Paser failed to establish his 
charges, though in one case, to be mentioned 
directly, there was plain evidence of the violation 
of a royal tomb. ‘The Prince of the Town took 
his failure rather badly, and spoke wild whirling 
words before a riotous deputation of Necropolis 
workmen, which got him into trouble; but bit 
by bit the actual truth leaked out, though not in 
the Commission. 

Three years later, in the reign of Ramses X, 

I 


130 BURIED ROYALTIES 


sixty persons, mainly priests and officials of the 
Necropolis, were arrested on the charge of 
complicity in the thefts; and even this big bag 
of robbers did not bring security to the royal 
dead. Erelong the priests of the dead kings were 
frantically hustling the mummies of their dead 
masters from one tomb to another in the vain 
attempt to put them beyond the reach of the 
spoilers, until at last the bulk of the great Theban 
Pharaohs were gathered, or rather huddled, 
together, in the obscure shaft of the unfinished 
tomb of Queen Astemkheb at Der el-Bahri, or 
in the tomb of Amenhotep II in the Valley of 
the Kings. 

The kind of treatment which was meted out 
to the mighty dead by the sacrilegious rascals 
in the Theban Necropolis is detailed for us in 
the confession of one of them, a confession 
extracted, for the rest, by the time-honoured 
Eastern questionary of the bastinado. ‘“‘ We 
found the august mummy of this god,”’ says the 
thief, describing his work at the tomb of King 
Sebek-em-saf and his wife Queen Nub-khas, 
“with a long chain of golden amulets and 
ornaments round the neck ; the head was covered 
with gold. The august mummy of this god 
was entirely overlaid with gold, and his coffin 
was covered both within and without with gold, 
and adorned with every splendid costly stone. 
We stripped off the gold which we found on the 
august mummy of this god, as well as the amulets 
and ornaments from around the neck, and the 
bandages in which the mummy was wrapped. 
We found the royal wife equipped in like manner, 


BURIED ROYALTIES 131 


and we stripped off all that we found upon 
her. We burnt her bandages, and we also stole 
the household goods which we found with 
them, and the gold and silver vessels. We 
divided all between us; we divided into eight 
parts the gold which we found with this god, 
the mummies, the amulets, the ornaments and 
the bandages.”’ 

Such was the treatment accorded to a Pharaoh 
of Egypt by one of his subjects three thousand 
years ago; a curious commentary on the present- 
day Egyptian protests against the opening of 
the royal tombs in the interests of science ! 
But the story of the Ramesside tomb-robberies 
is only an illustration of two contradictory crav- 
ings which are seen working all down the long 
record of the Egyptian monarchy. On the one 
hand there is the constant attempt of royalty 
to secure for itself by the most elaborate pre- 
cautions that age-long endurance of the physical 
frame which was deemed a necessary condition 
for the welfare of the dead king in the Under- 
world, an attempt which expresses itself in 
different ways, some of them most wonderful, 
in the successive periods of Egyptian history ; 
on the other, there is the equally constant and 
resolute determination of the Egyptian tomb- 
robber that not all the divinity which doth hedge 
a king, and especially a Pharaoh, shall keep him 
from his prey. The Ramesside thief has any 
amount of lip-reverence for the dead king whose 
rest he so rudely disturbs ; but all the time that 
he is talking about “‘ the august mummy of this 
god,” he is stripping the gold and jewels from it, 


me BURIED ROYALTIES 


and his accomplices are kindling the fire which 
will shortly destroy, from an Egyptian point of 
view, King Sebek-em-saf’s hope of immortality ; 
and the contradiction is an epitome of a good 
deal in the story of Egyptian royalty. 

The most enduring religious feeling in the 
Egyptian was the craving for immortality ; and 
the most permanent, as it was one of the earliest 
religious convictions, was that immortality was 
linked with faith in the god Osiris, who, as the 
legend ran, had been treacherously slain by his 
brother Set, had risen from the dead, had been 
judged and pronounced just by the tribunal of 
the gods, and thenceforth reigned as the god of 
the Underworld and the judge of the dead. 

The devout Egyptian believed that after 
death, if the necessary conditions had been 
fulfilled on his behalf, he was identified with 
his god, and like him rose again, was justified, 
and admitted to the Egyptian Elysian Fields. 
These conditions, briefly stated, were, first, the 
continuance for as long a period as possible, of 
the body, in a state as closely as possible resemb- 
ling that of life. Whether this need, which, of 
course, was responsible for the characteristically 
Egyptian practice of mummification, sprang from 
the belief that the spiritual essence of the dead 
man might find a resting-place after death in 
the mummified shell of its living abode, or 
whether the creation of the mummy was merely, 
as Professor Peet asserts, a counsel of despair, 
an attempt to deny death for as long as possible, 
is not certain; but the attempt to preserve the 
body, first by the provision of a secure tomb, and 


BURIED ROYALTIES 133 


later by mummification as well, endures through 
the whole of Egyptian history. The second 
condition was the provision of food and drink, 
and all the comforts of life, for the dead man in 
his tomb. The third was the equipping of him 
with all the words of power which would enable 
him to escape the dangers which haunted the 
ways of the Underworld, and to pass the ordeal 
of the judgment, and with amulets which would 
prove efficacious in warding off the assaults of 
the demons of the Underworld. Last of all, 
as in the Elysian Fields there was work to be 
done, and it was not fitting that a king or a great 
noble should stoop to manual labour, the dead 
man had to be provided with simulacra of servants 
who should answer for him when he was called 
upon for service, and take upon themselves his 
burden of labour. 

Out of all these conditions there arose 
gradually the whole wealth of Egyptian funerary 
equipment, as it is found in the tombs of the 
great men of the land, and above all in those of 
the Pharaohs, an equipment whose splendour 
has dazzled the whole world in the revelations 
of the tomb of Tutankhamen. From the very 
earliest times the kings of Egypt were laid to: 
rest with elaborate provision for the wants of 
the dead monarch, and the provision grew in 
completeness and complexity with each successive 
generation, till it reached its culmination in the 
gorgeous tombs of the Theban Pharaohs of 
the New Empire, with their hundreds of feet of 
rock-hewn chamber and corridor, their glittering 
canopies, their nests of gilded coffins, their 


134 BURIED ROYALTIES 


wealth of costly amulets and illuminated papyri, 
their stores of ushabtis, and, at the heart of all, 
the wonderfully preserved mummy of the man 
for whom all this magnificence had been prepared. 

It may be questioned, however, whether all 
these precautions did not rather tend to defeat 
their own end, and whether Pharaoh might not 
have slumbered in greater security had his tomb 
been less gorgeous and less richly equipped than 
he could hope to do when his tomb was a wonder 
of the world, and when all men knew that 
wealth untold was stored within its dark depths. 
At all events we know that from the earliest days 
of the Egyptian kingdom to the latest the kings 
were few indeed whose rest was not rudely broken 
by the sacrilegious hands of robbers. ‘The fate 
of King Sebek-em-saf, already described, is 
typical of that of the royal tombs in general. 
For five thousand years human greed has proved 
more powerful than human piety or even than 
human superstition. ‘To-day, the professional 
tomb-robber of native birth, though his activities 
are as skilfully conducted as ever, finds a rival 
in the scientific explorer, whose disturbance of 
the rest of the royal dead, though there are still 
many who object to the work as a profanation 
of what all men should regard as sacred, is at 
least conducted with as much reverence as 
possible, and in the interests not of individual 
greed of gain, but of the general sum of knowledge 
of the human race. 

In this respect the situation should be clearly 
understood. It is not a question of whether the 
dead kings of ancient Egypt shall or shall not 


BURIED ROYALTIES 135 


be allowed to rest in peace in their tombs. That 
question has been settled, and settled in the 
negative, for many centuries by the persistent 
habit of the Egyptians themselves. Robbed the 
tombs of the Pharaohs (such of them as still 
remain undisturbed) will inevitably be. That 
is as sure as death itself. The only question 
is whether the robbery shall be conducted by 
ignorant fellahin for the sake of private gain, 
and in such a fashion that the whole of the results 
shall be scattered among a score of private col- 
lections, and all their historic value forever lost, 
or whether it shall be conducted in orderly and 
scientific fashion, the finds duly catalogued in 
their true order, and gathered together in one 
great assemblage in a place where they can be 
studied in their true relation to one another, and 
to other finds of similar character. . 

There can be no doubt as to which of these 
methods is preferable. To deny to the man of 
science the opportunity of investigating the 
history, the art, and the life of the past as revealed 
in the treasures of the royal tombs is simply to 
make it certain that, without securing in the least 
the sanctity of the tombs, all the knowledge 
which might have been drawn from them shall 
be lost forever to the world. This is the sufficient 
justification of those excavations which, in spite 
of all the interest created by their revelations, 
have so often created also a feeling of repugnance 
and protest. 

The story of the royal tombs of Egypt begins 
with the excavation of the Sacred City of Osiris, 
Abydos. The work there is by no means the 


136 BURIED ROYALTIES 


earliest in point of time of the series of dis- 
coveries which have been made in connection 
with the burial of royalty, though Abydos was 
one of the sites excavated by Mariette, who 
revealed to the world the wonderful XIXth 
Dynasty work of the temple of Sety I there. 
Much had been discovered at Thebes and at 
Memphis before Amélineau and Petrie began 
at Abydos those researches which have revolu- 
tionised our knowledge of early Egyptian history 
and civilisation, and have given back to us several 
centuries of the story of human effort which had 
previously been shrouded in darkness; but it 
seems best to follow the subject down the line 
of history rather than to follow the order of 
discovery with its consequent mixing up of all 
the dynasties and periods. 

Up to the nineties of last century, it may be 
said that practically nothing was known of those 
earliest Kings of Egypt who reigned before the 
time of the [Vth Dynasty. The history of 
Eeypt began with the Pyramid-builders, Khufu, 
Khafra, and Menkaura; and so far as any real 
knowledge went, Egyptian civilisation sprang, 
like Athene, full-armed and full grown into 
being, and offered to the world as its firstfruits 
the most gigantic structures ever reared by the 
hand of man. 

Obviously this was an impossibility, for 
things do not happen thus in real life, and the 
advance of civilisation is a business, not of leaps 
and bounds, but of slow and ordered progress ; 
but before the Pyramid-builders there was 
nothing in Egyptian history but a gulf of misty 


‘SOGAGV ‘I ALAS AO ATMWAL NI AAVNNO‘TOO ‘QI 





ee ¥s ie V7 wha . 
. i Aa * + ae ts, 
SE) us 7 3 an 
A een dee a 4 


i woe aay 7 : 





BURIED ROYALTIES 137 


darkness, in which a few dim and mighty shapes 
could be faintly discerned through the clouds. 
Manetho, the Egyptian historian of Sebennytos, 
preserved in the few fragments of his story which 
have survived the names, and a few more or 
less incredible legends, of the great men who 
had lived and reigned before the Pyramid- 
period ; but they were only shadows, and the 
bulk of what little he told us of them was too 
fantastic to command any respect. ‘The chief 
figure of his story was the king Menes, or Mena, 
who was said to have founded Memphis, and who 
seemed to have some semblance of reality among 
the pale shades of the others ; but even he came 
to us in Manetho’s pages in such a questionable 
shape as to seem more a figure of romance than 
of fact. 

The discoveries of the closing years of the 
nineteenth century, however, have put an end 
to all that vagueness, and while our knowledge 
about the earliest dynastic kings of Egypt is 
still scanty enough, it is quite solid and real as 
far as it goes. Not only so, but excavation has 
resulted in the extension of knowledge to the 
period before the rise of the earliest dynastic 
rulers, and such a mass of material has been 
accumulated bearing on the life of the pre- 
dynastic Egyptians as to justify Professor Peet's 
statement, “‘ it may reasonably be said that we 
are as well acquainted with the material civilisa- 
tion of this era as with that of any other in 
Egyptian history, though at the same time it 
has to be admitted that our knowledge of its 
actual history amounts to practically nothing.” 


138 BURIED ROYALTIES 


With the pre-dynastic tombs, however, and 
with their comparatively meagre provision for 
the dead, we have not to do at present. All 
that need be said is that the pre-dynastic Egyptian 
buried his dead in a shallow pit cut in the sand 
or the soft rock, the body being laid on its side 
in a crouching posture, the knees drawn up 
towards the chin, and the hands placed in a 
supplicating attitude before the face. Around 
the dead man, who was often covered with a 
reed mat, were placed the vases for food and 
drink, the various utensils, flint knives, ivory 
tablets, and suchlike things which were held 
to be necessary or useful for him in the life 
beyond, and above all the carved slate palette 
which was used for grinding the green face- 
paint in which the early Egyptian delighted, and 
the material for making the paint itself. 

From these early tombs we have learned 
that the pre-dynastic Egyptian was far from being 
an uncultured savage. Hus funerary equipment, 
primitive as it is in some respects, shows us that 
he had already acquired the rudiments of that 
art of representing human and animal form which 
was to be carried to such remarkable heights in 
the dynastic period; he was an accomplished 
potter, whose vessels, though he was as yet 
ignorant of the potter’s wheel, are so perfectly 
moulded by hand that the absence of the wheel 
is no loss, and who “ belonged to one of those 
rare and happy periods when the craftsman 
seems incapable of an error of taste, and in 
consequence almost every form that leaves his 
hands is a thing of beauty’; and he had an 


BURIED ROYALTIES 139 


inexhaustible patience and an amazing skill in 
the working of vessels of the hardest stone which 
make the pre-dynastic hard stoneware the 
standard of quality by which all succeeding 
periods are judged. 

The disclosure of the tombs of the true early 
dynastic period, as distinguished from the earlier 
tombs which we have been describing, was to 
come from the Holy City of ancient Egypt— 
Abydos. The reason for the fact that the royal 
tombs of this period are to be found in the 
neighbourhood of a town which was never the 
capital of the land, and not at such important 
cities as Memphis or Thebes, is, of course, that 
Abydos had a sanctity to which no other place 
in Egypt could lay claim, as the burial-place of 
the head of the God of the Resurrection, Osiris, 
after his slaughter and dismemberment by Set. 
Osiris was not the original god of the dead at 
Abydos, for there existed, long before his supre- 
macy, the worship of a local god Khenti—* The 
First of the Westerners,” whose place Osiris 
usurped, or rather with whom he was identified. 
But from a very early date Osiris was supreme 
at Abydos. Every devout Egyptian desired to 
be buried, if possible, at Abydos, and as close as 
might be to the burial-place of the God of the 
Resurrection ; if actual burial was impossible, as 
in the vast majority of cases, the next best thing 
was to be allowed to set up a memorial slab in 
the neighbourhood, or to make a pilgrimage, 
even after death, to the Holy City, before being 
laid in the less holy ground elsewhere ; while 
if none of these expedients was feasible, at least 


140 BURIED ROYALTIES 


one could send a little votive vase of common 
pottery, and have it laid near to the sacred site. 
Accordingly the Necropolis at Abydos is full of 
memorials of all periods of Egyptian history, 
and in particular the ground is so crowded with 
broken pottery of all ages and types that the 
Arabs call the place “‘ Umm el-Ga’ab,” “ ‘The 
Mother of Pots.” 

It was on this site that M. Amélineau began 
his excavations in 1895, continuing them till 
the spring of 1898. He discovered several large 
chamber tombs, which contained many articles 
of exquisite workmanship, vases, and plaques in 
fine stone and in pottery, ebony and ivory tablets, 
bearing inscriptions in archaic hieroglyphics, and 
evidence that the tombs had belonged to kings 
of Egypt earlier in date than the period of the 
Pyramid-builders. In particular he found the 
tomb of a king whose name he read as Khent, 
and whom he identified with Osiris himself, 
as one of the titles of the god is ‘‘ Khent-Amenti.”’ 
In January, 1898, he found in this tomb part of 
a skull which he conjectured to be the skull of 
the god, and on the same day his workmen 
unearthed a granite bier of familiar Egyptian 
shape to which he gave the name of “ The Bed 
of Osiris.” 

Had these attributions been established M. 
Amélineau’s discoveries, important enough in 
themselves, would have been absolutely unique 
in character. But the somewhat acrimonious 
discussion which followed the announcement of 
the finds, established the fact that though he had 
discovered the tomb of one of the earliest kings 


BURIED ROYALTIES 141 


of Egypt it was the tomb of a man, and not of 
a god. The Bed of Osiris proved to be a New 
Empire copy of some more ancient bier placed 
there by Egyptians who had made the same 
mistake as the modern explorer, and imagined 
that they were restoring the actual tomb of the 
god of the Underworld. The great discovery 
thus failed to produce the effect which its import- 
ance deserved, and rather cast ridicule upon the 
possibility of retrieving for serious history the 
period of the earliest dynasties. M. Amélineau 
shortly afterwards abandoned his uncompleted 
task, believing that the site was completely worked 
out, and for a time Abydos remained without 
any further attempts to unravel its mysteries. 

In the winter of 1899-1900, however, Professor 
Flinders Petrie began work on the abandoned 
site, and the results of his patient and skilful 
study have been of supreme importance for 
the reconstruction of this earliest period of the 
history of the ancient Egyptian kingdom. He 
not only found in the tombs already discovered 
a great quantity of valuable material, but added 
considerably to the number of known tombs, 
and planned with the utmost care all those which 
came to light. In the main, these royal tombs 
of the earliest dynasties proved to conform to a 
single type, though the variations in size and in 
the number of apartments are considerable. 
Generally speaking, there is a large central 
chamber, dug in the soil, and sometimes 
approached by a stairway. This chamber, which 
we may believe to have been the actual royal 
sepulchre, is lined, and sometimes floored, with 


142 BURIED ROYALTIES 


wood, though in some instances the flooring is 
of stone, in one case of granite, the earliest known 
examples of stonework. Around the central 
chamber are grouped smaller cells, in which 
were stored the provision for the use of the dead 
king in the Underworld, or where the bodies of 
his favourites who were doomed to accompany 
him in his dark journey were laid after they had 
been slain during his funeral rites. 

The great tomb of King Kha-sekhem of the 
IInd Dynasty, 223 feet by 54 feet, is unique in 
the fact that its central chamber, 10 feet by 17 feet, 
and nearly 6 feet deep, is entirely built of stone, 
and is the earliest known example of a piece of 
mason-work. Each tomb, when it was completed 
and occupied, was roofed with wooden beams, 
and above it the sand was piled in a low mound, 
the precursor of the great stone burial mounds 
which were to appear ere long when the pride of 
the [Vth Dynasty monarchs was no longer 
content with anything less than a pyramid for 
its memorial. Above the tomb a pair of grave- 
steles bearing the king’s name were placed, so 
that the royal cemetery of Abydos must have 
presented an appearance not unlike that of a 
modern churchyard with its mounds and its 
headstones. 

No royal bodies, of course, were found in 
these earliest tombs. Time and the tomb- 
robber had done their work too well for that, 
and the art of mummification was as yet unknown. 
At a very early date the tombs had been rifled, 
and some of them burned, no doubt in the 
process of disposing of the bodies after they had 


BURIED ROYALTIES 143 


been plundered, as the Ramesside robber disposed 
of the mummy of Sebek-em-saf. The most 
unquestionably personal relic discovered was the 
shrivelled arm of the queen of King Zer, which 
had been stolen by some robber who had not 
time to carry off his plunder, and had thrust it 
into a hole in the tomb wall, where it was found, 
with its four beautiful bracelets still intact, by 
one of Petrie’s workmen. What was left in the 
tombs is simply what previous robbers had not 
deemed worth the trouble of carrying away. 
Yet these pieces of pottery, these broken bits 
of ivory furniture, these ebony and ivory plaques, 
with their archaic inscriptions, have proved of 
inestimable importance ; for they have enabled 
us to fashion in our minds a picture, rude enough, 
no doubt, and sadly lacking in detail, but unques- 
tionably true in its main outline of the earliest 
ordered civilisation in the history of the world. 
We can see that by 3500 B.c., the very latest 
date to which the Ist Dynasty can be brought 
down (Petrie dates it from 5500 B.c.), the Egyp- 
tian state, under ‘“‘ The Scorpion,” Narmer, or 
Aha-men, the group of kings who probably 
stand for the Menes of Manetho’s story, 
had long and completely emerged from the 
barbarism which swathed the rest of the world 
save Babylonia, and possibly Crete, and was 
already thoroughly organised and master of 
all its own resources. War, which had produced 
‘the union of the two sections of the land, the 
Delta and the Upper Valley, was carried on, not 
as a matter of chance razzias, but with the move- 
ment of great armies which could sweep a whole 


144 BURIED ROYALTIES 


populace into their net. The great mace-head 
of King Narmer records the capture of 120,000 
men, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The 
same king has in his train a Leader of the Cere- 
monies, a title which shows that the etiquette 
of the court was already thoroughly organised, 
and at an early date the Commander of the 
Inundation shows by his presence that the 
Egyptian already realised the importance of this 
great annual event, which, indeed, was no doubt 
the compelling cause which resulted in the 
extraordinarily early growth of organisation in 
Egypt as compared with other lands. 

That the equipment of the royal household 
was sumptuous and tasteful, and that the personal 
adornments of the glittering figures who occupied 
its stage were of the richest material and of the 
highest artistic quality, even the pitiful relics 
which have survived are sufficient to assure 
us. Pharaoh’s palace was adorned with vases 
and bowls of diorite, breccia, rock-crystal, and 
alabaster, wrought with matchless skill, and 
ground to translucent thinness; his furniture 
was of ebony and ivory exquisitely carved and 
adorned with hammered gold. Nor was the 
glow of beautiful colour wanting to the picture ; 
for the Egyptian craftsman had already mastered 
that art of glazing objects with brilliant colour 
which his successors practised with such satisfy- 
ing results. The ladies of the court found that 
the goldsmith was capable of meeting their 
desire for costly and tasteful jewellery in a 
fashion that has never been surpassed, and the 
bracelets of the Queen of Zer, of amethyst, 





IQ. BRACELETS (Ist DYNASTY) ; CHAIN (vith DYNASTY) ; GOLD 
SEAL (vith DYNASTY); GOLD UR#&US (x1Ith DYNASTY). 


(From ‘Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.’’) 


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BURIED ROYALTIES 145 


turquoise, lazuli, and gold, are of fine design 
and astonishingly good workmanship; while 
the existence of a Court barber is attested by 
the plait of false hair which was found in the 
tomb of Zer, and was perhaps worn by the lady 
of the bracelets. } 

The art of hieroglyphic writing was already 
fully established, and though the hieroglyphics 
are archaic in form, they are quite intelligible. 
In many of the tombs are found small ivory 
plaques, ‘‘ made by the king’s carpenter.”” ‘These 
are inscribed, each with the records of the events 
of a single year; so that we have evidence of 
a regular system of chronicling. The British 
Museum possesses the lid of the ivory box in 
which King Semti kept his Great Seal—‘“ The 
Golden Seal of Judgment of King Den ’’—so 
that manifestly official documents were in exist- 
ence, and had to be authenticated by the royal 
seal. Of art, nothing on a large scale has 
survived ; but the artist who carved the little 
ivory statuette of a king (perhaps Semti) wearing 
the White Crown, and clothed in a long parti- 
coloured robe, was already, within his limits, a 
master ; and Professor Petrie says of the statuette 
of Khasekhem of the IInd Dynasty, found at 
Hierakonpolis, “the art of these figures shows 
a complete mastery of sculpture, the face being 
more delicately modelled than almost any later 
work.” Altogether we must conceive of the 
Court of the earliest Dynastic Kings of Egypt 
as being organised on a high plane of luxury, 
and indeed of comparative refinement. ‘There 
is little that can be called barbaric, save the 

K 


146 BURIED ROYALTIES 


possible survival of the custom of slaying the 
king’s favourites to accompany him in his 
journey through the Underworld. 

The results of this exploration of the resting- 
places of the first buried royalties of Egypt may 
not in themselves be imposing, when compared 
with the bewildering wealth of some of the later 
royal interments; but their importance is not 
to be measured by mere quantity or richness in 
the precious metals, but by the fact that they have 
given to us a revelation of a whole period of 
human activity which was previously hidden 
beneath the mists of antiquity. Viewed in this 
light it becomes apparent that these poor frag- 
ments from the tombs of Abydos have a value 
far exceeding that of many much more gorgeous 
finds, and scarcely surpassed by the discoveries 
of any period. ‘They stand, in this respect, on 
the same level with the revelation of the Minoan 
civilisation at Knossos, or that of the city-states 
of Sumer at Lagash. 

The search for the buried royalties of Egypt 
next brings us into touch with the great age of 
the Pyramid-builders, beginning with Zeser 
and Seneferu, and extending, with gradually 
diminishing splendour, down to the last relics 
of the XIIth Dynasty—a period which has 
already been dealt with in detail. It is followed 
by the dark period which witnessed the incursion 
and supremacy of the Hyksos kings, and the 
War of Independence—a troubled period from 
which few relics have survived, though the 
account of the robbery of the tomb of King 
Sebek-em-saf of the XIIIth Dynasty, with which 


BURIED ROYALTIES 147 


our chapter began, shows that the kings of even 
these dark days were laid to rest with at least 
something of the ancient splendour of Egyptian 
royalty. 

When we resume our story, we find that two 
great changes have taken place, one in the course 
of the national history, the other in the burial 
customs with which we have to deal. The 
centre of gravity of the Empire has shifted from 
the area south of the Delta, embracing Saqqara, 
Memphis, and the Fayum, to the great city 
from which the Theban princes had been direct- 
ing the struggle against the Hyksos ; and hence- 
forward, throughout all the most brilliant period 
of Egyptian history, Thebes remains almost 
exclusively the royal abode, and, particularly 
for our purpose, the place where the great 
monarchs of the New Empire were buried in 
the midst of all their magnificence. 

Along with this political change has gone 
another, which has completely revolutionised 
the funerary customs consecrated by so long 
usage. The resting-place of a Pharaoh is no 
longer marked by a “ star-y-pointing Pyramid,” 
with its temple and causeway. The tombs of 
the great nobles of the Middle Kingdom at 
Beni Hasan and elsewhere had already been 
indicating a change in the funerary ideal, and 
the temple of Mentuhotep at Der el-Bahri, with 
its combination of pyramid and rock-hewn 
shrine, may perhaps be looked upon as the com- 
promise between the old ideal and the new. 
Henceforward the actual tomb and the funerary 
temple were to be separated by the necessities 


148 BURIED ROYALTIES 


of the locality in which the first was situated. 
The Temple was to stand by itself, free in the 
open plain on the western bank of the Nile; 
the Tomb was to be hidden from human know- 
ledge, so far as possible, in a wild and desolate 
valley of the Libyan hills behind the plain and 
its girdling cliffs. 

On the western bank of the Nile, opposite 
Thebes, there lies a great bay of the Libyan 
cliffs, extending for more than two miles from 
the ruined palace of Amenhotep III and the 
temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu on the 
south, to Drah Abu’l Neggah and the temple 
of Sety I at Qurneh on the north. From cape 
to cape of the bay there stretches, like the string 
of a bow, a row of ruined funerary temples, 
built by most of the notable Theban Pharaohs. 
Beyond the line of the string towards the Nile, 
the two Memnon colossi still keep watch and 
ward—all that remains of the most gorgeous of 
all the western temples, reared by the most 
gorgeous of Theban Pharaohs—Amenhotep III ; 
while between the string and the bow, and 
clinging close to the curving cliffs, lie the temples 
of Der el-Medinet and Der el-Bahri. Beyond 
the northern nock of the bow at Drah Abu’l 
Neggah, a rugged winding path leads north- 
westwards into the heart of the hills for about 
a mile, then turning sharply westwards, it reveals 
a forked valley, one branch of which is known 
as the West Valley, and the other and more 
important as the East Valley. Together these 
two ravines make up the Biban el-Moluk, or 
Valley of the Kings, the most famous place of 


_— SESE ee er 





20, ENTRANCE-TO THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS, ,THEBES. 


=i 








BURIED ROYALTIES 149 


royal sepulture in the world, where for a thousand 
years the kings of the earliest of world-empires 
were laid “ all of them in glory, everyone in his 
own house.” 

They chose for their resting-place one of 
the wildest and most barren scenes which it 
is possible to imagine, a sun-scorched wilderness 
of rock and tumbled stone, where the heat, 
reverberated from rock to rock under a sky of 
brass, is like that of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. 
But it was not beauty or richness that they were 
seeking when they came to the Valley of the 
Kings ; it was the security which not even the 
Great Pyramid had been able to give to the mighty 
dead. ‘The loneliness and desolation of the 
place were the very things which prompted its 
selection; for they sought—how vainly the 
future was to show—a place where human foot 
had never trod, and where they might expect 
that their long sleep would be unbroken by any 
intruder. The sacrilegious attempts of the type 
of robber who had scattered to the winds the 
dust of Khufu they foresaw, and tried, though 
with only imperfect success, to guard against ; 
what they could not foresee was the advent of 
the scientific excavator, with a patience which 
rivals and a skill which far surpasses that of 
the native plunderer, whose work has put the 
crown on the lengthy demonstration of the futility 
of all their pathetic efforts at security. 

The type of tomb which is characteristic of 
the Valley of the Kings is simple enough in its 
general idea, though its development is some- 
times complex enough. An entrance gallery is 


150 BURIED ROYALTIES 


driven into the rock sloping downwards, the 
passage-way being sometimes an inclined plane, 
sometimes a stairway. This corridor is some- 
times interrupted by a deep pit, possibly meant 
to catch any water which might flow in through 
the doorway, but more probably to render the 
task of the robber more difficult. Beyond the 
pit, the passage is continued, and gives access 
to chambers and halls varying in number and 
size, until at last the sarcophagus chamber is 
reached. Of this general type there are all 
varieties, from the simplicity of such a tomb as 
that of Tutankhamen, with its short entrance 
passage, and its scanty provision of poorly 
decorated rooms, to the complexity of the tombs 
of Ramses III or Sety I, with their hundreds of 
feet of corridor and chamber, brilliantly decorated 
with the finest art which their time could produce. 

The decoration of the royal tombs, though 
often of high quality artistically, is generally 
of a sombre and gloomy character, differing in 
this from the brilliant pictures of life which are 
characteristic of the Old Kingdom tombs of the 
nobles at Saqqara, or even from some of the 
private tombs, such as those of Nekht and 
Rekh-ma-ra at Thebes. Generally speaking, 
the leading conception is that the dead king, 
accompanied by the sun-god or identified with 
him, sails in the bark of Ra through the Under- 
world, bringing light as he passes. On his 
voyage he is accompanied by all manner of 
spirits and genii, which ward off the enemies of 
the soul from the divine boat. ‘The subjects 
of the illustrations are largely derived from two 


BURIED ROYALTIES Ist 


books of funerary ritual, The Book of Him 
Who is in the Duat (Underworld), and The 
Book of the Gates, while portions of the Book 
of the Dead are also illustrated. 

These wonderful tombs have always been 
more or less known in historic times. Strabo 
mentions that there were in his time forty tombs 
worthy of a visit, and we may be sure that the 
bulk of these had already been long rifled, or at 
least cleared of their contents to avoid the danger 
of desecration, before the Egyptian Empire ended 
its long course. The centuries between the 
visit of the old geographer and that of the scholars 
of the French Expedition had brought oblivion 
to the majority of the tombs, for the French 
explorers mention only eleven, the others having 
meanwhile got covered up and forgotten. 

It is with the coming of Belzoni on his second 
journey in 1817 that the modern search for 
buried Pharaohs may be said to begin, and since 
his discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the work of 
finding Pharaohs has gone on for more than a 
century with more or less success, until at the 
present time something like sixty tombs have 
been found, including a few which are not royal, 
and some which are merely pits. The prob- 
ability is that few tombs remain to be discovered 
in the Valley, for most of the great royalties of 
the Empire have now been accounted for in one 
way or another. 

One chance of some importance, however, 
remains. The last king whom we know to 
have been buried in the Valley of the Kings is 
Ramses XII of the XXth Dynasty. In the great 


152 BURIED ROYALTIES 


cache at Der el-Bahri, which will fall to be spoken 
of shortly, several of the mummies of kings of the 
XXIst Dynasty were found, along with those of 
the earlier and more famous lines ; but the actual 
tombs of the XXIst Dynasty have never yet 
come to light, and it is possible that some 
fortunate explorer may yet fall, in one of the 
desolate valleys among the Libyan hills, on the 
necropolis of a line of kings who, if they do 
not fill so great a place in the history of Egypt 
as their predecessors of the XVIIIth and XIXth 
Dynasties, were yet sufficiently important to 
make the discovery of their resting-place a matter 
of great moment. 

It was on October 6 that Belzoni began those 
excavations in the Valley which resulted in the 
discovery of what is still the finest example of 
a royal tomb of the Empire. On the oth he was 
fortunate enough to discover two tombs of 
considerable importance, one of them beautifully 
painted, the other undecorated, but containing 
some funerary furniture and two _ female 
mummies. “ ‘Their hair,” says Belzoni, whose 
summary method of dealing with mummies we 
have already noticed, “‘ was pretty long, and well- 
preserved, though it was easily separated from 
the head by pulling it a little’?! On the r1th, 
this amazingly fortunate man, who knew so 
little the greatness of his good fortune, entered 
another tomb, evidently one of still greater 
importance, which, with its contents, is dismissed 
in half a page of his story. “We found a ~ 
sarcophagus of granite, with two mummies in 
it, and in a corner a statue standing erect, 





PAC “AKON COLE TRV NII IES IDS WINILILIE NS COM ARIES, TUNIS). 





BURIED ROYALTIES 153 


6 feet 6 inches high, and beautifully cut out of 
sycamore wood ; it is nearly perfect except the 
nose, We found also a number of little images 
of wood, well carved, representing symbolical 
figures. Some had a lion’s head, others a fox’s, 
others a monkey’s. . . . In the chamber on our 
right hand we found another statue like the first, 
but not perfect.” Thus summarily Belzoni 
dismisses a discovery which would make most 
present-day explorers green with envy. What 
became of the two mummies, the two funerary 
statues, and the ushabtis, we are not told, but 
can easily imagine. 

These, however, were only the preliminaries 
of the great find which was awaiting the lucky 
excavator. On October 16 he started operations 
at a point about 15 yards from the tomb already 
mentioned (which would seem, therefore, to 
have been that of Ramses I), and in a spot which 
seemed to his workmen most unlikely to yield 
anything. On the 17th they struck the first 
indications of a cutting, and on the next day 
the entrance of a tomb was laid bare. Before 
the close of the day Belzoni had penetrated 
into the tomb as far as the antechamber to the 
first of its pillared halls, where his progress 
was interrupted for the time by a pit 30 feet 
deep, which had to be bridged before he could 
advance further. Crossing it on the next day, 
he gained access to the rest of the tomb, and the 
next three weeks he spent as a man in a dream 
wandering through the chambers of the great 
tomb, and recording to the best of his ability 
the wonders which he had been the first to see 


1564 BURIED ROYALTIES 


for nearly three thousand years. His attempts 
at representation of what he saw were imperfect 
enough, and his nomenclature of the various 
chambers is merely paltry. ‘Titles like ‘ The 
Drawing-room,” ‘‘ The Room of _ Beauties,” 
“The Side-board Room,” seem ludicrously out 
of place amidst the sombre dignity of Sety’s 
sepulchre. Still Belzoni cannot be denied the 
merits of patience and perseverance, and it was 
no careless worker who spent a whole twelve- 
month in the stifling atmosphere of a tomb in 
the Valley of the Kings taking impressions in 
wax of all the figures on a tomb which measures 
328 feet from end to end. 

Belzoni attributed the tomb to Necho and 
Psamtek II of the XXVIth Dynasty, finding 
evidence to his satisfaction of the attribution in 
a procession on the walls, in which he saw 
Persians, Jews, and Ethiopians, all of whom, 
according to him, ‘‘ Nichao and Psammethis ” 
had conquered. He was thus a matter of seven 
hundred years out in his dating of his discovery, 
for the tomb is that of Sety I of the XIXth 
Dynasty, and a monument of the art of the New 
Empire just at that point when it had passed its 
zenith, and was trembling on the verge of the 
decadence, though still capable of the wonders 
of Abydos, which are rivalled by some of the 
work here. Sety himself, of course, he did not 
find in the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus 
which stood in one of the pillared halls of the 
tomb. Luckily, when we think of how the 
explorer would probably have treated him, that 
honourable king and valiant soldier had long 


BURIED ROYALTIES 166 


centuries before been removed from his splendid 
underground palace to the obscurer but safer 
hiding-place where he was discovered in our 
own time, and treated with a little more reverence 
than he would have received from Belzoni; but 
his sarcophagus was in itself a prize more than 
sufficient to reward the excavator for all the 
labour he had spent. 

“It is a sarcophagus,” says the lucky dis- 
coverer, ‘‘of the finest Oriental alabaster, 
g feet 5 inches long, and 3 feet 7 inches wide. 
Its thickness is only 2 inches; and it is trans- 
parent, when a light is placed in the inside of it. 
It is minutely sculptured within and without with 
several hundred figures, which do not exceed 
2 inches in height. . . . I cannot give an idea of 
this beautiful and invaluable piece of antiquity, 
and can only say that nothing has been brought 
into Europe from Egypt that can be compared 
with it.” He was not far wrong in his enthusi- 
astic estimate of the artistic value of his find, 
as anyone who has seen the exquisite piece of 
carving in the Soane Museum will admit. 

The fame of Belzoni’s discovery was not 
long in reaching the ears of the Turkish officials, 
and ere long the chief local authority, Hamed 
Aga of Keneh, appeared upon the scene with 
a troop of cavalry, having been so eager over 
the find that he had made the journey in thirty- 
six hours instead of forty-eight. It was no love 
for antiquity, however, which had brought him. 
All the artistic wonders of the tomb were lost 
on him and his following; but they ransacked 
every corner of the tomb with great eagerness. 


156 BURIED ROYALTIES 


After a long search the Aga dismissed his 
soldiers, and turning to Belzoni, he revealed the 
true object of his anxiety. ‘* Pray, where have 
you put the treasure?” he said. Belzoni’s 
denial of the existence of any such thing was 
met with an incredulous smile. “I have been 
told,”’ said this characteristic specimen of ‘Turkish 
officialdom, “‘ by a person to whom I can give 
credit, that you have found in this place a large 
golden cock filled with diamonds and pearls. 
I must see it. Where is it?’ ‘The explorer at 
length succeeded in convincing the Aga that 
there was nothing to lay hands on, and with 
supreme disgust he rose to leave the tomb. 
Belzoni asked him what he thought of the beauti- 
ful figures which surrounded him. ‘“ He just 
gave a glance at them, quite unconcerned, and 
said, ‘ This would be a good place for a harem, 
as the women would have something to look 
at.’’? ‘Thirty years later, Layard’s experience 
of the Turkish official was almost identical with 
that of Belzoni. 

Forty-two years elapsed before anything of 
importance was added to our knowledge of the 
buried royalties of Egypt. It was in 1859 that 
the beautiful jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep was 
rescued by Mariette from the hands of the worthy 
successor of Hamed Aga, as has already been 
told. But it was not till 1881 that there occurred 
the first of those amazing resurrections of the 
Theban Pharaohs which since then have been 
repeated on several occasions, culminating with 
the discovery of the most splendid of all royal 
burials in the tomb of Tutankhamen. 


BURIED ROYALTIES 157 
The story of the 1881 find is one of the 


romances of excavation, though the credit of it, 
if there is any, goes, not to the scientific explorer, 
but to the native practitioner of the gentle art 
of tomb-robbery. It was in 1876 that evidence 
began to accumulate, in the shape of various 
papyri and other articles of XXIst Dynasty 
date which appeared mysteriously on the market, 
that the fellahs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh had 
somehow or other gained access to some royal 
tomb of that period. The Service of Antiquities 
took the matter up, and suspicion fell on the 
members of a family named Abd-er-Rassoul. 
In April, 1881, Maspero arrested with his own 
hand Ahmed, one of the members of the family, 
and committed him to the tender mercies of 
Daoud Pasha, the third Mudir of Keneh who 
has appeared in this chapter, but who, unlike 
his predecessors, comes in on this occasion on 
the side of the angels, so to speak. Justice, in 
the Egypt of the eighties, had ways and means 
of arriving at its ends which seem strange to 
mere Occidentals, and Maspero covers a good 
deal in his simple statement that Daoud Pasha 
carried on the investigation “ with his habitual 
severity.” The Ramesside inspectors, in I100 
B.C., put things more bluntly—“ They were 
beaten with sticks both on their hands and feet ” 
—but probably the facts were not very different 
in the modern trial. The only result was to 
produce a flood of testimony that Ahmed Abd- 
er-Rassoul ‘“‘ never had excavated, and never 
would excavate, that he was incapable of mis- 
appropriating the tiniest antiquity, to say nothing 


158 BURIED ROYALTIES 


of violating a royal tomb,” and the spotless 
victim of oppression had to be liberated “‘ pro- 
visionally.” “* ‘The vigour with which the inquiry 
had been conducted by Daoud Pasha’ had, 
however, impressed the mind of one of the 
Abd-er-Rassoul family with the conviction that 
there are cases where honesty, or the best possible 
imitation of it, is the best policy. Mohammed 
Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul came secretly to the 
Mudir, made a clean breast, or at least a breast 
as clean as was convenient, to that Rhadamanthus, 
and on July 5, 1881, Emile Brugsch Bey, repre- 
senting the Service of Antiquities, at last found 
the truth about the business, as usual, at the 
bottom of a well. 

He was led by the penitent sinner Mohammed 
to a lonely spot at the foot of the Libyan cliffs, 
not far from Hatshepsut’s famous temple at 
Der el-Bahri. There, after a long climb up the 
hillside, and the scaling of a high cliff, he found 
behind a great rock the mouth of a black shaft 
about 6 feet square, the well of the unfinished 
tomb of Queen Astemkheb of the XXIst Dynasty ; 
and the story of his experiences may best be 
told by himself, 

‘* Finding Pharaoh was an exciting experience 
for me. It is true I was armed to the teeth, 
and my faithful rifle, full of shells, hung over 
my shoulder; but my assistant from Cairo, 
Ahmed Effendi Kemal, was the only person with 
me whom I could trust. Any one of the natives 
would have killed me willingly, had we been 
alone, for everyone of them knew better than I 
did that I was about to deprive them of a great 


BURIED ROYALTIES 159 


source of revenue. But I exposed no sign of 
fear, and proceeded with the work. The well 
cleared out, I descended, and began the explora- 
tion of the underground passage.” 

There are many types of courage ; but surely 
not the least remarkable is that of the man of 
science who allows himself to be lowered on an 
Arab rope, down a 4o-feet shaft, to explore a 
dark gallery of the dead, while the rope which is 
his only link with life and light is held above 
by a man who would cheerfully have left him 
to keep unending vigil beside the Pharaohs whom 
he was seeking. 

Mohammed’s penitence, however, or perhaps 
we had better say, his respect for Daoud Pasha’s 
‘ habitual severity,” kept him true, and Brugsch 
had no other terrors to face than those of his 
strange task. ‘‘ Soon,” he says, “‘ we came upon 
cases of porcelain funeral offerings, metal and 
alabaster vessels, draperies and trinkets, until, 
reaching the turn in the passage, a cluster of 
mummy-cases came to view in such number as 
to stagger me. Collecting my senses, I made 
the best examination of them I could by the light 
of my torch, and at once saw that they contained 
the mummies of royal personages of both sexes ; 
and yet that was not all. Plunging on ahead of 
my guide, I came to the chamber, and there, 
standing against the walls, or lying on the floor, 
I found even a greater number of mummy-cases 
of stupendous size and weight. Their gold 
coverings and their polished surfaces so plainly 
reflected my own excited visage that it seemed 
as though I was looking into the faces of my 


160 BURIED ROYALTIES 


own ancestors. The gilt face on the coffin of 
the amiable Queen Nefertari seemed to smile 
upon me like an old acquaintance.” ‘“‘ The 
fellahs,” says Maspero, “had unearthed a 
catacomb crammed with Pharaohs.” Among 
the mummies were those of several of the most 
famous Pharaohs of the New Empire, Seqenen- 
Ra, the hero of the War of Independence, 
Amenhotep I, and Queen Aahmes Nefertari, 
Thothmes II, and Thothmes III, the greatest 
soldier of Egyptian history, Sety I, Ramses II, 
and Ramses III, the most famous kings of the 
XIXth and XXth Dynasties, Pinezem I and 
Pinezem II of the XXIst Dynasty, Queen 
Hent-taui, Queen Nezem-Mut, and others. 

The question of the removal to a place of 
security of this astonishing mass of dead royalty 
presented its own difficulties. The removal had 
to be as speedy as possible, for now that 
the secret was out every hour would add to the 
danger of a violent attack on the shaft, and the 
dispersal for ever of its previous treasures. Yet 
the problem of removal was no easy one. The 
spot where the shaft lies is lonely and difficult 
of access; and the coffins of some of the kings 
and queens were of huge size and corresponding 
weight. ‘That of Queen Aahmes Nefertari, for 
instance, is 10 feet long, and required sixteen 
men to lift it. 

‘‘ Early the next morning,’ says Brugsch, 
‘three hundred Arabs were employed under my 
direction—each one a thief. One by one the 
coffins were hoisted to the surface, were securely 
sewed up in sailcloth and matting, and then were 


BURIED ROYALTIES 161 


carried across the plain of Thebes to the steamers 
awaiting them at Luxor.” 

It took six days of hard labour, under the 
blazing sun of an Egyptian July, before the 
tomb was cleared; and then three days more 
were spent in waiting for the Museum steamboat 
to arrive. Brugsch must have been an anxious 
man as he watched the efforts of the three 
hundred professional tomb-robbers from whose 
hands he was snatching what they regarded 
as their legitimate prey; and no doubt he 
heaved a sigh of genuine relief when, on July 20, 
he handed over his precious freight to the 
Museum at Boulak, and was delivered from the 
burden of royalty. Sir Gaston Maspero has 
told us how all along the Nile, from Luxor to 
Quft, both banks of the river were covered with 
frantic crowds of fellahs, the women tearing their 
hair and wailing, the men firing rifles, as they 
followed the downstream progress of the steamer 
bearing the mummies. So, no doubt, only with- 
out the rifles and the steam, their ancestors had 
followed the funeral barks which bore across 
the river the dead bodies of these mighty kings 
three thousand years before ! 

The very richness of the find proved some- 
what of an embarrassment to the authorities at 
the Cairo Museum, and it was several years 
before the results of Brugsch’s great haul of 
Pharaohs were properly sorted out and classified. 
It was not till May, 1886, that the unwrapping of 
the mummies began, and the task was only 
completed in the end of June. The figure of 
supreme interest was that of Ramses II, who 

L 


162 BURIED ROYALTIES 


was then believed to be the Pharaoh of the 
Oppression of the Israelites, and who was then 
taken more at the estimate of his own overweening 
vanity than he is at present. The mummy of 
the great king was solemnly unwrapped in the 
presence of an illustrious gathering, the Khedive 
of Egypt himself verifying the existence of the 
later inscription of the priests of the XXIst 
Dynasty on the wrappings around the body, 
before the process of unwrapping began. The 
state of the mummy agreed with the historical 
evidence as to the length of the reign of Ramses. 
The king must have been nearly one hundred 
years old when he died, and his body bears the 
marks of extreme old age. 

“The mummy,” says Maspero, “is thin, 
much shrunken, and light ; the bones are brittle, 
and the muscles atrophied, as one would expect 
in the case of a man who had attained the age 
of a hundred; but the figure is still tall and of 
perfect proportions. The mask of the mummy 
gives a fair idea of that of the living king; 
the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly 
brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, 
displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath 
the sombre materials used by the embalmer.”’ 

The hero of the battle of Kadesh must in 
his prime have been a man of large and powerful 
frame. ‘“‘ Even after. the coalescence of the 
vertebre and the shrinkage produced by mummi- 
fication, his mummy still measures over 5 feet 
8 inches’’; so that we may picture him as a 
formidable figure over 6 feet in height, perhaps 
nearer 7 feet with the high war helmet of the 


BURIED ROYALTIES 163 


Pharaohs crowning his head, as he charged with 
arrow drawn to the head, in his rattling war- 
chariot upon the Hittite ranks. His conduct at 
Kadesh suggests a good trooper, but a dull 
general, and his mummy does nothing to cause 
a revision of the judgment. 

An infinitely nobler figure was that of the 
father of Ramses, Sety I, whose mummy was 
also found in the cache. ‘‘ 'The fine kingly head 
was exposed to view,” says Maspero. “* It was 
a masterpiece of the art of the embalmer, and the 
expression of the face was that of one who had 
only a few hours previously breathed his last. 
Death had slightly drawn the nostrils and 
contracted the lips, the pressure of the bandages 
had flattened the nose a little, and the skin was 
darkened by the pitch; but a calm and gentle 
smile still played over the mouth, and the half- 
open eyelids allowed a glimpse to be seen from 
under their lashes of an apparently moist and 
glistening line, the reflection from the white 
porcelain eyes let in to the orbit at the time of 
burial.”” The somewhat gruesome art of the 
Egyptian embalmer reached its culmination in 
this extraordinary piece of work, and while to 
our minds the whole practice verges upon, if 
it does not overstep, the limits of the decent 
into the realm of the horrible, we may admit 
that it comes as near as possible to the attainment 
of what Professor Elliot Smith tells us was the 
aim of the embalmer—‘‘ to make the represen- 
tation of the dead man so life-like that he should, 
in fact, remain alive.’ We should never have 
known how noble and dignified a type the 


164 BURIED ROYALTIES 


aristocratic Egyptian of 1300 B.c. had attained 
had it not been for the preservation of the grand 
head of Sety, which teaches us that the sculptor 
of the exquisite reliefs of Abydos was doing no 
more than bare justice to his king when he carved 
the delicate beauty which charms us to-day. 

If the beauty of Sety’s face almost justified 
both the morbid skill which sought to deny the 
reality of death and the curiosity which unveiled 
the secrets of the grave, the same cannot be said 
of the mummy of Seqenen-Ra, not the least 
interesting of the grim assemblage. ‘There are 
few things more ghastly than the head of the 
old hero of the Expulsion of the Hyksos, with 
three gaping wounds on skull and face, and the 
teeth clenched, in the death-agony, upon the 
mangled tongue. Yet even this grim evidence 
of a violent death on the field of battle seems to 
bring the reality of that ancient struggle in which 
the Pharaoh died more forcibly home to the 
imagination. 

A still more horrible figure of nightmare was 
that of the unnamed person whose contorted 
limbs and writhen countenance suggested to 
Maspero the most ghastly of all suspicions as 
to how he met his end. ‘ It makes one’s flesh 
creep to look at it,” says Maspero, speaking of 
this mummy ; “the hands and feet are tied by 
strong bands, and are curled up as if under an 
intolerable pain ; the abdomen is drawn up, the 
stomach projects like a ball, the chest is con- 
tracted, the head is thrown back, the face is 
contorted in a hideous grimace, the retracted 
lips expose the teeth, and the mouth is open as if 


BURIED ROYALTIES 165 


to give utterance to a last despairing cry. The 
conviction is borne in upon us that the man was 
invested while still alive with the wrappings of 
the dead.’ Others have suggested a less horrible 
interpretation of the condition of the figure. In 
the report of the trial which took place in the 
reign of Ramses III of individuals accused of 
a conspiracy against the life of the king it is 
significantly said of some of those whose guilt 
was established, “‘ They died of themselves,” 
and the suggestion has been made that this 
figure, whose contortions might well be due to 
the action of an irritant poison, is that of one 
of these involuntary suicides. In either case, 
the thing is sufficiently horrible, and hints, not 
obscurely, at that darker aspect of Oriental 
Court life which lay beneath all the glitter and 
splendour of the Theban palace. 

The find of Der el-Bahri was followed, in 
1894-5, by the discoveries of M. de Morgan 
at Dahshur, which have given us the exquisite 
jewellery of the XIIth and XIIIth Dynasty 
already alluded to in our chapter on the Pyramids. 
And then, in 1898, M. Loret discovered in the 
Valley of the Kings the tomb of Amenhotep II, 
son of the great conqueror Thothmes III. 

Until the great discovery of last year threw 
all others into the shade, this discovery of M. 
Loret was unique, for the mummy of Amenhotep 
was found still resting in its coffin under the 
gold-starred and blue-painted roof of the funerary 
chamber—the first Pharaoh who had ever been 
found sleeping in the tomb where he was laid. 
His own records tell us of his prowess. “ He 


166 BURIED ROYALTIES 


is a king very weighty of arm,” so the inscription 
of the Amada and Elephantine steles runs ; 
‘“‘ there is not one who can draw his bow among 
his army, among the hill-country sheikhs, or 
among the princes of Retenu, because his strength 
is so much greater than that of any king who has 
ever existed.’’ In later days this boast of the 
old Pharaoh got twisted into the curious legend 
which Herodotus records of the king of Ethiopia 
who challenged Cambyses to draw his bow. 
The redoubtable weapon itself, strange to say, 
was found in the tomb along with its owner. 
It bore the inscription: “‘ Smiter of the Cave- 
dwellers, overthrower of Kush, hacking up their 
cities . . . the great wall of Egypt, protector of 
his soldiers.”” Amenhotep was still wrapped in 
his shroud and adorned with garlands; but the 
tomb had been ruthlessly plundered in ancient 
days, and little of artistic value was found. One 
of the side-chambers of the tomb, however, 
yielded a store of Pharaohs, only second in import- 
ance to the great find of Der el-Bahri. Here 
were gathered nine royal mummies, among 
them those of Thothmes IV, Amenhotep III, 
Siptah, Ramses IV, Ramses V, and Ramses VI. 
Most interesting of all, in view of the idea then 
prevalent of the date of the Exodus, was the 
discovery, along with these, of the mummy of 
Merenptah, who was held to be the Pharaoh of 
the Exodus. ‘The absence of Merenptah from 
the royal gathering at Der el-Bahri was explained 
by interested but casual readers of Scripture by 
the fact that of course he was drowned in the 
Red Sea. ‘The narrative of Exodus, of course, 


BURIED ROYALTIES 167 


makes no such statement, and Merenptah duly 
appeared, though the interest attaching to him 
has somewhat waned with the progress of the 
view that the Exodus took place two hundred 
years before his reign. 

The fate of the tomb of Amenhotep is sug- 
gestive of the difficulties which meet the explorer 
in his attempt to preserve for science and to treat 
with proper reverence the relics of the past which 
he unearths. The great king was left in his 
coffin, with a few articles of his funerary furniture 
beside him. The result was that in spite of the 
armed guard which is maintained in the Valley 
of the Kings, or perhaps with the complicity 
of the guard, the tomb was rifled in 1901, the 
mummy of the Pharaoh tumbled out on the 
floor, and the model boat which had been left 
beside the king stolen. 

With the suggestion that Tutankhamen should 
be allowed to rest in the midst of the splendours 
which accompanied him to the grave, everyone 
must sympathise ; the question is, will he be 
allowed to rest in peace, no matter what the 
precautions which may be taken, in the midst 
of a people with whom tomb-robbery is a 
profession of six thousand years standing, and 
who know the matchless value of the treasure 
which lies within their reach? Whatever the 
decision, it may be hoped that if the mummy of 
the last king in the direct line of the great XVIIIth 
Dynasty be found beneath his gorgeous canopy 
it will not be made the subject of a vulgar show, 
as is done with that of Amenhotep II. 

In 1902 the work of excavation in the Valley 


168 BURIED ROYALTIES 


of the Kings was undertaken by an American, 
Mr. Theodore M. Davis, or rather the funds for 
the work were provided by Mr. Davis, while 
the actual work of excavation was carried on 
by officials of the Service of Antiquities, first 
Mr. Howard Carter, then Mr. Weigall, and Mr. 
Ayrton. In 1903 Mr. Carter found the tomb of 
Thothmes IV, son of Amenhotep II, and father 
of Amenhotep III. His mummy had already 
been found in the tomb of his father, but many 
articles of funerary furniture, mostly broken, 
were found, including the embossed leather 
front of a state chariot, with decoration in gesso. 
Between 1902 and 1912, the work financed by 
Mr. Davis was crowned with the most astonishing 
success. In these years were found the tombs of 
Queen Hatshepsut, King Siptah, Akhenaten (or 
rather the tomb of Queen Tiy, with the mummy 
of Akhenaten), Horemheb, Prince Mentuher- 
khepshef, and, above all, the tomb which, though 
its occupants were not of royal rank, proved yet 
the richest and the most interesting which was 
ever discovered, till it was outclassed by that of 
Tutankhamen—the tomb of Yuaa and Tuau. 

It was in February, 1905, that the workmen 
of Mr. Davis struck the first indication of the 
tomb in the shape of a well-cut stone step, which 
promised to prove the first of a flight descending 
to a tomb-passage. By February 12 the door 
was cleared, and the next day Mr. Davis, with 
the late Sir Gaston Maspero and Mr. Weigall, 
penetrated with some difficulty into the tomb- 
chamber, and the little party found themselves 
in the presence, not only of two of the most 


BURIED ROYALTIES 169 


interesting personalities of Egyptian history, but 
also of the most wonderful collection of funerary 
furniture which, up to that time, had ever 
rewarded the explorer. ‘Their delight was very 
nearly turned to tragedy before they had begun 
to realise the importance of their find. In his 
eagerness to inspect the funeral sledge, on which 
Maspero had just read the famous name of Yuaa, 
Mr. Davis stooped with his candle close to the 
bitumen-covered woodwork, and was pulled back 
just in time. One touch of the flame on the 
pitch, and the corridors of the tomb would have 
been a roaring tunnel of flame, in which Yuaa, 
his funerary equipment, and his discoverers would 
probably all have perished together. 

The danger once realised, candles were 
discarded, and electric light led into the tomb. 
And then the explorers began to realise the full 
wonder of their discovery. The tomb was full 
of furniture of the finest and most careful work- 
manship. Armchairs carved and inlaid, coffers 
of wood inlaid and enamelled with that wonderful 
blue of which the Egyptians had the secret, 
boxes of painted wood, with figures in gilt gesso, 
designed to hold the canopic jars which contain 
the viscera of the dead, ushabti figures, some of 
them plated with gold or silver, wicker-work 
baskets for holding perfume bottles, couches of 
elegant design, a perfectly preserved specimen 
of the type of light chariot in which the Theban 
noble of the Empire took his airing, cushions 
stuffed with down, still soft and resilient after 
three millenniums, costly alabaster vases, toilet 
articles of all sorts, and a plentiful supply of the 


170 BURIED ROYALTIES 


mummified meats which the dead might require 
for their journey through the Underworld ; the 
chamber was a storehouse of all that the Egyptian 
deemed desirable for his use in this life or the 
next. Nor were the needs of the spirit neglected. 
There stood the magical figures by whose help 
the occupants of the tomb were to make their 
way through the dark paths of the Duat, inscribed 
with the ‘“‘ Chapter of the Flame,’ or the 
“Chapter of the Magical Figure of the North 
Wall”; while a great roll of papyrus 22 yards 
long contained other prayers which would assist 
the sleepers to conquer all the dangers of their 
long road. Never had such an assemblage of 
beautiful and curious things rewarded the seeker 
even in this land of beautiful and curious things. 

Fascinating as the treasures of the tomb 
were, however, the main interest was not in them, 
but in the two gilded coffins in which the owners 
of all this wealth lay quietly sleeping their long 
sleep. “ First above Yuaa and then above his 
wife the electric lamps were held, and as one 
looked down into their quiet faces there was 
almost the feeling that they would presently 
open their eyes and blink at the light. The 
stern features of the old man commanded one’s 
attention, and again and again our gaze was 
turned from this mass of wealth to this sleeping 
figure in whose honour it had been placed there.” 
For these two silent tenants of the tomb were 
the man and woman to whose influence, in all 
probability, was due not a little of that great 
religious revolution which in a few years altered 
the whole course of Egyptian history, and swayed 


BURIED ROYALTIES 171 


the balance of the destinies of the Ancient East. 
Prince Yuaa and his wife ‘Tuau were the father 
and mother of that famous Queen 'Tiy, whose sway 
over the mind of her husband Amenhotep III 
prepared the way for the supremacy of that 
new spiritual faith of which her son, the ill-fated 
Akhenaten, was in the fulness of time to be the 
exponent and champion, and whose failure 
broke his heart in the midst of the downfall of 
the empire to which he had vainly attempted 
to teach the creed of the Brotherhood of Man. 
To few people has it been given to exercise so 
great an influence upon the course of history as 
to these two quiet figures whose rest was broken 
after 3300 years by the representatives of three 
nations whose ancestors were outer barbarians 
when Prince Yuaa and his wife were foremost 
figures in the most glittering court of the Ancient 
Fast. 

Two years later, the work of Mr. Davis 
resulted in another discovery, less important 
from the point of view of the wealth of funerary 
furniture involved, for in this case there was 
little found, but even more interesting in view 
of the personality whose mummy occupied the 
tomb. The site of the new find was at the 
corner of the ravine leading to the well-known 
tomb of Sety I, and was covered with gravel and 
loose stones. ‘‘ After some days of hard work, 
the regular rectangle of a pit appeared upon the 
soil, then two or three steps appeared, followed 
by a staircase open to the sky, a door, a narrow 
passage, and a wall of rock-work and beaten 
earth. ‘The seals affixed by the guardians, more 


172 BURIED ROYALTIES 


than thirty centuries before, were still intact on 
the lime-wash.’”’ Breaking them on January 6, 
1907, Mr. Davis and Mr. Weigall penetrated 
into a narrow passage, which was almost blocked 
by two panels of gilded wood, which had once 
formed part of a funeral canopy, like that of 
Tutankhamen. Wriggling past these with 
difficulty, they entered a roughly hewn and 
quite undecorated chamber, on the floor of which 
lay a few earthen pots, some alabaster ornaments, 
and a number of amulets. But the sight which 
arrested the eye was that of the coffin, which, 
at the first glance, seemed in the glare of the 
electric light to be made of massy gold. “ It 
seemed,’ says Maspero, “as if all the gold of 
ancient Egypt glittered and gleamed in that 
narrow space.” ‘The news of a wonderful dis- 
covery of treasure spread far and wide through 
the neighbourhood, growing as it spread, till 
the report had reached such fabulous proportions 
that it was necessary to place a guard over the 
tomb to prevent an assault. Of course it was 
more seeming than reality, for the gold turned 
out to be mere gold-foil, and the tomb was in 
reality singularly poor in objects of value. ‘The 
coffin had originally been placed upon a bier of 
the usual form; but this had decayed, and the 
heavy coffin had fallen, and its lid had come off 
in the fall, exposing the head and feet of its 
tenant, from which the bandages had decayed. 
The body was wrapped in sheets of gold-foil, 
and the inscription on the coffin, worked in semi- 
precious stones, gave the title of Akhenaten, 
“the beautiful child of the Sun.” 


BURIED ROYALTIES 173 


Such a discovery was, of course, most 
unexpected ; for Akhenaten had made his capital, 
not at Thebes, which he hated, but at Tell 
el-Amarna, where he had declared his intention 
to be buried, and where his tomb was known. 
Besides, the inscription on the funeral canopy 
stated that Akhenaten had made it for his mother 
Queen Tiy. The explorers therefore concluded 
that they had indeed discovered the tomb, part 
of the funeral furniture, and the skeleton (it 
cannot be called a mummy) of Queen Tiy, and 
in this belief they sent the broken fragments of 
the skeleton to Professor Elliot Smith for exam- 
ination, only to be informed by him that what 
they had sent was not the body of an old woman, 
but of a young man, who, if normal, which was 
doubtful, could not have been much older than 
twenty-six when he died. ‘There seems in fact 
to be little doubt that the skeleton which was 
discovered in the tomb of Tiy was that of the 
man whose action in one direction and inaction 
in another changed the destiny of the ancient 
world in one of the most critical periods of its 
history. Mr. Davis, strange to say, could never 
bear the idea that he had found the bones of 
Akhenaten, though one would have thought 
that the discovery of the most pathetic and 
interesting figure of Egyptian history would have 
put the crown on the satisfaction with which he 
could justly regard his work. He had set his 
heart on discovering Queen Tiy, and to have 
even her far more famous son substituted for 
her was a bitter disappointment to him. 

But how came Akhenaten, the heretic king, 


174 BURIED ROYALTIES 


‘“‘ that criminal of Akhetaten,’’’ as the priests of 
Amen always called him, to be buried, not in 
his own heretic capital at Tell el-Amarna, but 
in orthodox Thebes, and in his mother’s tomb ? 
There is, of course, no certain explanation of 
the facts ; but from what is known of the history 
of the period an explanation may at least be 
suggested with a reasonable amount of confidence 
that it is not very far from the truth. When 
Akhenaten died, his body was no doubt buried 
at Tell el-Amarna, as he had decreed. When 
his son-in-law, ‘Tutankhaten, and his daughter, 
Ankh. s. en. pa Aten, found the pressure of 
circumstances too strong for them, and were 
obliged to return to Thebes, to restore the old 
religion, and to change their names to Tutankh- 
amen and Ankh. s. en. Amen, they carried with 
them, doubtless, the body of the reformer, still 
revered and beloved, and gave it honourable 
burial in the tomb of ‘Tiy—the most fitting place, 
since no royal tomb could have been prepared 
in Thebes. Butas time went on, the reactionary 
priests of Amen became more and more the 
dominant element in the kingdom, and they had 
none of the chivalrous spirit which prompted 
Charles V’s “‘ I war not with the dead,” at the 
tomb of Luther. The only way in which they 
could strike at the dead heretic was also, to an 
Egyptian mind, the most certain and the most 
deadly ; they could destroy his hopes of immor- 
tality by desecrating his tomb, and blotting out 
his name from it. So the body of Queen Tiy 
was removed from the tomb which had been 


i Akhetaten, the town created by Akhenaten, the man. 


BURIED ROYALTIES P78 


polluted by the presence of her son, his name 
was erased from the inscriptions, and the 
entrance of the tomb was blocked with stones 
and sealed with the seal of Tutankhamen. Then 
the body of “ the world’s first great idealist and 
the world’s first individual” was left in solitude, 
and, as his enemies fondly believed, in eternal 
oblivion and shame, to await its resurrection, 
thirty centuries later, at the hands of a generation 
which has at least learned to appreciate and to 
honour the ideals for which he sacrificed so much. 

The remarkable success of Mr. Davis in the 
search for buried royalties was fittingly crowned 
a year later by the discovery of the tomb of 
Horemheb, the usurping reactionary who had 
formerly been a general in the service of Tut- 
ankhamen, and who seized the throne after the 
brief reigns of ‘Tutankhamen and Ay. The tomb 
had been plundered and wrecked, but the 
beautiful red granite sarcophagus, 8 feet 11 inches 
in length by 3 feet 9} inches in width and 4 feet 
in depth, was intact. In it were found the bones 
of one person, but in such a condition that it was 
impossible to determine the sex of the person 
to whom they had belonged. In 1906 Mr. 
Davis made another discovery, this time of an 
uninscribed chamber nearly filled with mud. 
The presence in the chamber and in the neigh- 
bourhood of a number of articles bearing the 
names of ‘Tutankhamen and Ankh. s. en. Amen 
led him to believe that this was the tomb of 
Tutankhamen, and the sumptuous volume in 
which he published the results of these last two 
discoveries was therefore entitled ‘‘ The Tombs 


176 BURIED ROYALTIES 


of Harmhabi and Touatankhamanou.” ‘Time 
and further investigation have proved that in 
this respect he was wrong, as also in the con- 
viction which he expressed in the book that 
“the Valley of the Kings is now exhausted.” 
‘ Another discovery was due sixteen years after 
his last find, which was to prove that the Valley 
yet held treasures whose beauty and richness 
could dazzle the world, and make even those of 
the tomb of Yuaa seem almost paltry by com- 
parison. Yet the work of Mr. Davis remains 
as one of the most remarkable series of successes 
which has ever rewarded excavation in Egypt— 
a fitting prelude to the great find of November, 
LG22) 


CHAPTER VII 


TUTANKHAMEN AND HIS SPLENDOURS 


ONDERFUL as the results of the work 
\ \ of Mr. Davis and his assistants had 
been, they were destined to be 
completely eclipsed by the most remarkable 
discovery which has ever been made in all the long 
story of Egyptological research. It may very 
well prove in the long run that the importance 
of the find historically is less than that of many 
less striking discoveries ; but as a revelation of 
the sheer wealth and artistic quality of the pro- 
vision which was made three thousand years ago 
for the journey through the Underworld of even a 
comparatively obscure and unimportant Pharaoh, 
there has never been anything to compare with 
the discovery the news of which was flashed 
across the world on November 30, 1922. ‘“ This 
afternoon,” the message ran, “‘ Lord Carnarvon 
and Mr. Howard Carter revealed to a large 
company what promises to be the most sensa- 
tional Egyptological discovery of the century. 
The find consists of, among other objects, the 
funeral paraphernalia of the Egyptian King 
Tutankhamen, one of the famous heretic kings 
of the XVIIIth Dynasty, who reverted to Amen 
177 M 


178 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


worship.” It is not often that newspaper reports 
err on the side of making too little of their subject ; 
but as the days and weeks passed on, and what 
seemed to be an unending procession of marvels 
defiled from the dark cave in the Valley of the 
Kings before the astonished eyes of numberless 
tourists, it became manifest that the half had not 
been told, and that Egyptology was faced with a 
wealth of material such as had never before been 
dealt with, and such as will take many years to 
appreciate and measure the full significance of. 
All that can be attempted here is to give a 
summary account of the find itself, and a brief 
provisional account of some of the more important 
of the treasures which have so far been disclosed ; 
for there can be no doubt that what has been 
handled is but a fraction of the treasure which 
still remains to be dealt with when the tomb is 
reopened and the actual sarcophagus-chamber 
and its annexe are cleared as the outer chambers 
have been. 

Some great Egyptological discoveries have 
been the result of a mere happy chance, as was 
the case in 1887, when a fellah woman, grubbing 
for phosphates among the rubbish heaps of 
Akhenaten’s ruined capital, found that store of 
cuneiform tablets which have since become 
world-famous as “ ‘The Tell el-Amarna Tablets,” 
and disposed of her interest in the find to a friend 
for the sum of two shillings. Some, as in the 
case of the Der el-Bahri cache, have resulted 
from the watch kept on the illegitimate practi- 
tioners of research ; and some, as in the case of 
Belzoni’s discovery of the tomb of Sety I, have 





GRANITE HEAD OF TUTANKHAMEN, CAIRO MUSEUM. 





TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 179 


been made with so little trouble that the wonder 
is that they were not made long before. But 
the discovery made by Lord Carnarvon and 
Mr. Howard Carter fell into none of these 
categories. It was the result of long and per- 
sistent and systematic work, carried on under 
very disappointing conditions, but with a clear 
appreciation of the object in view. For sixteen 
years the two explorers had been working together 
at Thebes, and already in 1912, they had published 
the results of their work in Five Years Explora- 
tion at Thebes. Their work had not been 
particularly fruitful, and when seven years ago 
they took over the abandoned right to work in 
the Valley of the Kings, their first efforts yielded 
no very brilliant success. ‘‘ Mostly disappoint- 
ments,’ was Lord Carnarvon’s summary of his 
previous finds. The explorers, however, were 
proceeding on a plan which was bound to lead 
to success in the end, if there was anything left 
to be found, and if their patience, or their 
resources, held out long enough in the face 
of a continued monotony of failure. Previous 
explorers, like Mr. Davis, had proceeded on the 
method of sondages, or trial pits, sinking a pit 
here and another there in spots which they 
judged likely. Such a method, obviously, may 
lead to success very simply and easily ; or, on 
the other hand, it may result in your missing the 
very spot where the treasure lies. The method 
adopted by Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Carter 
was much more thorough, though also much more 
laborious and monotonous. They systematically 
cleared the ground over a selected area down to 


1 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


the virgin rock. ‘The labour involved in such a 
method of work is, of course, enormous; it is 
said that the two explorers moved 200,000 tons 
of rubbish in their researches; but it is plain 
that there is no chance of missing your object 
by a foot or two, as is quite possible with the other 
plan. There may, of course, be nothing in your 
area at all; but if there is anything, you are 
bound to get it. 

So it proved at last in this case. On the fifth 
of November, Mr. Carter, who was working on a 
spot which so far had been untouched because 
it lay in front of the tomb of Ramses VI, which 
is one of the regular electrically lighted show- 
tombs of the Valley, came upon a rock-cut step, 
which seemed like the beginning of a flight 
leading toatomb. He cleared a few more steps, 
and then came to a door, or rather to a cement- 
covered wall, blocking a doorway. On the 
cement of the wall was visible the seal of the 
royal portion of the Theban necropolis, consisting 
of a jackal couchant above nine captives in rows 
of three. When the excavation had reached 
this stage, Mr. Carter cabled to Lord Carnarvon 
to come out to Egypt at once, as a fine discovery 
had been made, and the spot was covered up 
till his arrival. 

The resumption of the excavation showed 
that in ancient days a thief had broken into the 
tomb, which had been inspected and sealed by 
the inspectors of Ramses IX subsequent to his 
entrance. On the undamaged portion of the 
wall there could be seen the cartouche of the 
Pharaoh Tutankhamen, son-in-law and successor 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 181 


to the famous Akhenaten. After arrangements 
had been made for protecting the tomb and 
whatever it might contain from the efforts of 
the modern successors of the Ramesside thief, 
the entrance passage, about 8 metres long, was 
cleared, and another sealed door was reached. 
It was uncertain whether the explorers would 
find another staircase or passage behind this new 
obstacle, or whether it would give access to one 
of the chambers of the tomb. What followed 
may best be told in the words of Lord Carnarvon 
himself : 

‘““T asked Mr. Carter to take out a few stones 
and have a look in. After a few minutes this 
was done. He pushed his head partly into the 
aperture. With the help of a candle he could 
dimly discern what was inside. A long silence 
followed, till I said, I fear'in somewhat trembling 
tones, ‘ Well, what is it?’ ‘ There are some 
wonderful objects here,’ was the welcome reply. 
Having given up my place to my daughter, I 
myself went to the hole, and I could with diffi- 
culty restrain my excitement. At the first sight, 
with the inadequate light, all that one could 
see was what appeared to be gold bars. On 
getting a little more accustomed to the light it 
became apparent that there were colossal gilt 
couches with extraordinary heads, boxes here 
and boxes there. We enlarged the hole, and 
Mr. Carter managed to scramble in—the chamber 
is sunk 2 feet below the bottom of the passage— 
and then, as he moved around with a candle, we 
knew that we had found something absolutely 
unique and unprecedented. Even with the poor 


182 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


light of the candle one could see a marvellous 
collection of furniture and other objects in the 
chamber. There were two life-sized statues of 
the king, beds, chariots, boxes of all sizes and 
shapes—some with every sort of inlay, while 
others were painted—walking sticks, marvellous 
alabaster vases, and so on. After slightly 
enlarging the hole we went in, and this time we 
realised in a fuller degree the extent of the 
discovery, for we had managed to tap the electric 
light from the tomb above, which gave us far 
better illumination for our examination.” 

Inspection quickly proved that the first 
revelation was only the beginning of marvels. 
Beneath one of the state couches a small opening 
in the wall of the chamber showed where a 
second chamber opened off the first. ‘This room 
it was impossible even to enter, for it was crammed 
to a height of 5 feet with articles of furniture 
of all descriptions, packed close together in 
seemingly inextricable confusion. At the one 
end of the first chamber stood two life-sized 
statues of the king in bituminised wood with gold 
adornments, and between them was the evidence 
that other chambers lay beyond; for this 
part of the room had been closed with a wall 
on which the seals of the Ramesside inspectors 
could still be seen, and in the centre of this wall, 
on the floor level, there were traces of the fact 
that a break had once been made in the wall, 
sufficiently large to admit a small man. This had 
subsequently been sealed up again, probably 
by the inspectors of Ramses IX. 

Manifestly there was more to follow behind 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 183 


that sealed wall. In the two chambers which 
had been seen there was no trace of any sarco- 
phagus, or any evidence whatever of any 
interment. It was obvious, therefore, that, unless 
this wonderful mass of artistic craftsmanship was 
only a cache where robbers’ loot was gathered, 
or a gathering of costly material drawn together 
for safety from robbers, both of which alternatives 
seemed somewhat unlikely, the real tomb- 
chamber, with what was in all probability the 
unimaginable wealth of the great nest of coffins 
under its canopy, the coffers for the canopic 
vases, and all the other funerary regalia of a 
Pharaoh of the Empire, lay beyond the wall which 
closed the end of the first chamber. In that case, 
the revelations which awaited the explorers might 
well be of a kind which would make even the 
glories which had so far been disclosed look dim 
and paltry. ‘lhe explorers must have been sorely 
tempted to pierce the wall at once, and so arrive 
at least at some conception of the magnitude of 
their find; but prudence forbade this. The 
amount of material already under their hands in 
the outer chambers was sufficient to occupy all 
the time of the experts who had gathered to the 
scene for many weeks. ‘The fabrics concerned 
were all of them priceless, and some of them were 
of almost inconceivable delicacy. All of them 
were at least three thousand years old, and had 
during all that time been shut up in the still air 
of a subterranean vault. Until they had been 
carefully treated with preservatives, and insured, 
so far as possible, from the risks of exposure to 
the air and the heat of the upper world, it was 


184 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


impossible to do anything that would add to the 
task, already one of great labour and difficulty, 
which lay upon the explorers and their assistants. 
Accordingly curiosity was kept in check until the 
results of the first discovery should be secured, 
and the opening of what was hoped would prove 
the first intact royal tomb-chamber ever found 
in Egypt was deferred for awhile. Meanwhile 
for weeks the Valley of the Kings was beset, day 
after day, by throngs of tourists before whose 
astonished eyes there passed a seemingly endless 
procession of the marvels of ancient Egyptian 
craftsmanship of thirty centuries ago, and who 
seemed to take it as a personal grievance when 
the articles removed on any particular day were 
not sufficiently numerous or gorgeous to satisfy 
their craving for sensation. Tutankhamen 
became the fashion, and leaped at once into 
greater prominence than he ever enjoyed during 
his short and not particularly glorious reign. 
When the contents of the outer chamber had 
been /placed in safety, the time came for the 
breaking of the sealed wall which barred the sarco- 
phagus-chamber from view ; and on February 16 
this was at last accomplished in the presence 
of a distinguished company of Egyptologists, 
though the formal opening, at which the Queen 
of the Belgians was present, did not take place 
till two days later. When it was possible to 
see through the growing aperture into the inner 
chamber, the sight revealed was one to take 
the breath away from the most hardened 
treasure-hunter. Practically the whole chamber 
was filled, from end to end, and side to side, by 





DECORATION FROM A THEBAN TOMB. 


23 





TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 185 


an object which no man has seen intact for more 
than three millenniums—the funerary canopy 
or shrine of an Egyptian Pharaoh of the New 
Empire, beneath which, it might be hoped, lay 
the successive coffins, with all their wealth of 
amulets and ushabtis, which guarded the mummy 
of the dead king. The canopy itself was of the 
most extraordinary beauty and splendour. It 
was of wood heavily gilded, carved with repre- 
sentations of the Buckle of Isis and the Pillar of 
Osiris, and inlaid with panels of that exquisite 
blue glaze of which the Egyptians were so justly 
fond. Its upper edge was formed by the familiar 
Egyptian gorge-cornice, and its roof was of the 
usual coved type, common in shrines of all sorts. 
So completely did it fill the chamber, that there 
was scarcely room to pass between it and the 
rock walls, which were rather poorly decorated 
with painted figures. On the east side of the 
canopy were bronze-hinged doors, and when 
these were opened, there appeared within a 
second canopy, entirely gilt, and closed with doors 
-on which the seals, with their strings, were 
perfectly intact, a fact of great importance, since 
it signifies that in all probability the inner shrine 
remains absolutely as it was left on the day when 
the Pharaoh was laid to rest amidst all his 
splendours. Between the two canopies there 
lay alabaster vessels, amulets, scarabs of rare 
colour and fine material, and precious stones. 
Between the outer canopy and the wall of the 
chamber lay the paddles for the king’s barge on 
the waters of the Underworld. 

On the same side of the sarcophagus-chamber 


136 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


as the doors of the shrine, a large opening in 
the wall, which had never been closed, led into 
an annexe. On guard near the entrance of this 
room was an ebony and gold figure of the god 
Anubis as a jackal couchant on the top of his 
shrine. Perhaps the most conspicuous thing in 
the room was a great gilt coffer, standing over 
5 feet high, and adorned along the top with 
golden urzei, which in all likelihood is the shrine 
containing the Canopic Jars in which the viscera 
of the royal mummy were deposited. On its 
four sides were figures of guardian goddesses, 
enfolding the shrine with their arms, and wrought 
with the most wonderful delicacy of modelling 
and realism of expression. ‘They seemed, said 
one observer, to be turning reproachful faces 
towards the intruders who were disturbing the 
long peace of the tomb. The whole room was 
crowded with objects of all sorts, coffers and 
boxes of splendid material and workmanship, 
model boats for the king’s use in the Elysian 
Fields, ushabti figures in gold and silver, aud one 
exquisite and unique specimen, absolutely com- 
plete, of the ostrich-feather fans which are so 
often depicted on the reliefs of royal processions. 
The handle of this beautiful piece of craftsman- 
ship was of ivory, delicately carved and adorned 
with the royal cartouche inlaid in coloured stones. 

Such was something of the general impression 
which was left on the minds of the fortunate few 
who were privileged to be present at the most 
marvellous disclosure of the wealth and artistry 
of ancient Egypt which has ever been given to 
the world. ‘The impression was of the briefest, 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 187 


for the explorers had reluctantly to come to 
the conclusion that it was impossible to carry 
the work further this season. The heat of the 
Egyptian spring in the sun-scorched valley was 
already growing almost unbearable ; the amount 
of precious material already collected was such 
as would require months for its proper preserva- 
tion and arrangement, and it was impossible to 
add to it a far greater quantity of still more price- 
less treasure without risking loss and damage. 
Accordingly, after the tomb had been kept open 
for a few days longer, it was decided to close it 
again until the autumn, when the conditions for 
work would be more favourable. The gang of 
workmen was set to work again, and by the end 
of February the tomb of Tutankhamen was once 
more piled with many hundred tons of rubbish, 
and the king was left beneath his gorgeous 
canopy to enjoy for a few months longer the sleep 
which had been unbroken for 3300 years. 
Strangely enough, the incident did not close 
without an event which seemed to cast a dark 
shadow across all the splendour of the discovery. 
Almost immediately after the triumph of the 
opening, and before the freshness of its interest 
had faded from men’s minds, Lord Carnarvon 
was stricken down with fever, and in the begin- 
ning of April he died in Cairo, leaving his great 
work still incomplete. There is no need to talk 
of the flood of superstitious drivel which was let 
loose over the world by what seemed so tragic 
an ending to so great a success. It is hard to 
say whether stupidity or cruelty were more 
conspicuous in it, and it remains self-condemned 


18 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


in the eyes of all reasonable people. There is, 
no doubt, an element of sadness in the thought 
that he without whom these treasures of the past 
might never have been disclosed did not live to 
see the completion of his work; but there is 
surely also an element of satisfaction in the 
thought that he knew that his long toil had not 
been in vain, and that he had accomplished 
something unique in the story of the exploration 
of that ancient world to which we owe so much. 
To leave the scene of triumph while the splendour 
of accomplishment is still undimmed has ever 
been esteemed the happiest of destinies. If it be 
so, then Lord Carnarvon was felix opportunitate 
mortis. 

Before we turn to the consideration of some 
of the chief treasures which have so far been 
gathered from the outer chambers of the tomb, 
let us devote a moment to the question of who 
the Pharaoh is whose splendours have thus 
dazzled the world, and what is known of his 
reign and his times. Not the least remarkable 
feature of the whole find is that the man around 
whom all this magnificence was gathered is just 
about one of the last of the Pharaohs whom one 
would have suspected of creating a sensation in 
the world of Egyptology. His reign is one of the 
shortest and least fully recorded in the roll of 
the XVIIIth Dynasty ; indeed the only kings 
of the Dynasty who seem yet more insignificant 
than himself are his immediate. predecessor 
Smenkhara, and his immediate successor Ay. 
The circumstances of his reign, so far as they are 
known, are briefly these. ‘Tutankhamen began 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 189 


his career as one of the courtiers of Amen- 
hotep IV (Akhenaten), and one of his supporters 
in the great revolution which he attempted to 
carry out on the religion of Egypt ; though, from 
his apparent youth at the time of his death, he 
can scarcely have had any real share in the 
movement. Whether he was of the blood royal 
or not is uncertain. On the lion from Gebel 
Barkal, now in the British Museum, he calls 
Amenhotep III his father. If this means direct 
relationship, then he must have been the son of 
Amenhotep III by a secondary wife, and in that 
case he was a half-brother of Akhenaten, whose 
son-in-law he afterwards became. On the other 
hand, the title may be only one of respect applied 
to an indirect ancestor—really his grandfather- 
in-law. In any case he must have been of such 
noble rank, and of a family of such influence, 
that it was worth Akhenaten’s while to secure his 
adhesion to the new cause, even when he was no 
more than a boy, by marrying him to one of the 
young princesses. Accordingly he was married 
to the third of Akhenaten’s daughters, the 
princess Ankh. s. en. pa. aten, the first daughter, 
Meryt-aten, being married to another noble of 
the court, Smenkhara, and the second, Makt-aten, 
having died probably between her ninth and 
eleventh year ; and at this time, and till after his 
accession to the throne, he bears the name 
Tutankhaten, the name of Amen being of course 
proscribed by the new faith. 

On the death of Akhenaten without male 
issue, Smenkhara, the husband of the eldest 
princess, naturally, according to Egyptian custom, 


190 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


succeeded to the throne, and reigned for a short 
and uncertain period; then on his death or 
deposition, the succession fell to ‘Tutankhaten. 
For a time, apparently, he maintained himself 
in the new capital of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), 
but the reaction in favour of the old faith of 
Amen proved too strong for him, and he was 
obliged to remove the court to Thebes, and to 
conform to the worship of Amen. His name was 
changed to Tutankhamen (Living Image of 
Amen), and that of his wife to Ankh.s.en. Amen 
(Her Life is from Amen), and every trace of the 
religious revolution was obliterated so far as 
possible. ‘The duration of his reign is uncertain, 
and probably it cannot have been longer than 
nine years. It has been suggested, from the 
evidence of some of the articles in his tomb, 
that he died before attaining maturity—at all 
events he must have been still a young man at the 
time of his death. 

As to the events of his reign, we are much in 
the dark. ‘The brilliance of his funerary equip- 
ment has led to the rather hasty conclusion that 
the reign was marked by a great renaissance of 
Egyptian art and power, and an attempt to regain 
the Empire which had been largely lost during 
the pacifist reign of Akhenaten ; but this theory 
rests on very slight foundations, and, as we shall 
see, there is another and much more likely 
explanation of the splendour of the tomb. The 
only evidences of foreign enterprise during the 
reign are found in the inscriptions in the tombs 
of two of the great nobles of the period, Huy 
and Horemheb, the latter of whom usurped the 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 101 


throne after the death or deposition of Tutan- 
khamen’s successor, Ay. In the tomb of Huy 
there are records of tribute from Syria and 
the Soudan, so that it is evident that Egyptian 
influence was not altogether gone in these two 
quarters ; and one of the statements in the tomb 
of Horemheb seems to point to military opera- 
tions in Syria under Tutankhamen. In this 
inscription, from a fragment in the Cairo 
Museum, Horemheb describes himself as “‘ King’s 
follower on his expeditions in the south and north 
country,” and ‘‘ Companion of the feet of his 
lord upon the battlefield on that day of slaying 
the Asiatics.”’ 

Beyond this, there is really no evidence as to 
any events of importance during the reign, 
whose significance is not in itself, but in the fact 
that it marks the triumph of the forces of reaction 
and the reversion to the ancient customs and faith 
of the land. The early death of Tutankhamen 
left his wife, Ankh.s.en. Amen, in a very difficult 
position. She was the only representative in 
the direct line of the great XVIIIth Dynasty ; 
but in all probability her own tenure of the throne 
was very uncertain, and almost impossible. 

For a woman to rule the land was a thing not 
unheard of, for Hatshepsut had ruled with 
vigour and success ; but it was an unusual thing, 
though a woman could give to her husband a 
legitimate title to the royal dignity. Further, 
there was a point which rendered the reign of 
Ankh. s. en. Amen virtually an impossibility. She 
was deeply stained, in the eyes of the dominant 
priesthood of Amen, by the fact that she was the 


192 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


daughter of ‘“‘ that criminal of Akhetaten,” as 
her father was now called. Her husband had 
saved his throne, and probably his life, by his 
conformity to the old faith, and her conversion 
had accompanied his; but the daughter of 
Akhenaten can never have been persona grata to 
the priests of Amen, and when her husband was 
gone she must have felt that her tenure of the 
crown, and her very life, hung by a very frail 
thread. Accordingly she took steps to place 
herself in a position of greater security. 
Curiously enough, there has come to light from 
Boghaz-Kyoi, the Hittite capital, a letter from one 
of the Hittite kings, probably Mursil II, telling 
of some of the events of the reign of his father 
Shubbiluliuma, which gives us our last glimpse 
of the poor widowed queen struggling in despera- 
tion to escape from the net of deadly danger which 
was drawing closer and closer around her. 
‘Then their ruler,’ says the Hittite king, 
“namely Bib-khuru-riyas [the Hittite version of 
Neb. kheperu-Ra, the Solar name of Tutankh- 
amen], just at that moment died ; now the Queen 
of Egypt was Dakhamun [the Hittite version of 
Ankh. s.en. Amen]. She sent an ambassador to 
my father ; she said thus to him: ‘ My husband 
is dead ; I have no children ; your sons are said 
to be grown up; if to me one of your sons you 
will give, and if he will be my husband, he will 
be a help; send him accordingly, and thereafter 
I will make him my husband. I send bridal 
gifts.’ ’’? ‘The negotiations thus frankly opened 
by the queen apparently proceeded, not without 
some hitches, to the point when the bridegroom 





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TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 193 


was selected from among the Hittite princes ; 
for Mursil’s statement closes thus: ‘‘ And then 
the lady soon fulfilled her words and selected one 
of the sons.” Something, however, must have 
hindered the completion of the marriage. What 
it was we may Eg but with no assurance that 
we are right. The Hittites were old enemies of 
Egypt, and while Ramses II, a century later, 
obit safely wed a Hittite princess, it was quite 
another thing for a woman, very insecurely 
established on the throne, to propose to give 
Egypt a Hittite king. In itself the plan was 
likely to be most unpopular with poor Ankh. s. en. 
Amen’s subjects. Even more fatal to it would 
be the opposition of the priesthood. They, no 
doubt, had no desire to see the line of their 
great enemy established on the throne with a new 
lease of power, and backed by the might of the 
formidable Hittite Confederacy. It would be 
an easy thing for them to play on the native 
prejudice against the attempt to bring in a Hittite 
consort for their queen. ‘The probability is 
that the very step which Ankh. s. en. Amen took 
to secure herself actually hastened, or at least 
made inevitable, her downfall. At all events 
the unlucky young widow disappears, with this 
letter, from the page of history ; nor is it difficult 
to imagine the manner of her disappearance. 
The journey from the palace to the tomb has 
never been a long one for an unpopular sovereign 
in the East, whether in ancient or modern days. 
Such, then, is the story of Tutankhamen’s 
reign, so far as we know it. It may be that when 
all the secrets of his tomb are disclosed we may 
N 


194 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


learn a little more of the man and his times, 
though that is rather more than unlikely, for the 
papyri which may be found in the great shrine of 
the sarcophagus-chamber will probably be, not 
historical, but purely religious. Meantime, at all 
events, we know no more, and the little that is 
known only seems to underline the contrast 
between the insignificance of the king and the 
splendour of the tomb which has dansled all the 
world. The pathos of the whole thing can 
scarcely fail to appeal to the imagination. Here 
you have a dead monarch laid to rest with such 
pomp and magnificence that a mere glimpse of 
the glitter of his equipment has left the world 
bewildered and gaping; and when you try to 
conceive the actual facts of the lives behind all 
this gorgeousness, what you dimly discern, so 
far as you can see anything, is a poor young 
couple of children, for Tutankhamen and his 
wife were scarcely more than that, striving for 
a little to keep their heads above the dark flood 
of poisonous priestly hatred and intrigue which 
surged around them on every side, and sinking 
one after the other beneath their doom. 


“The glories of our blood and state 
Are shadows, not substantial things.” 


Obviously the time has not yet come for the 
discussion of the results of the discovery as these 
affect our ideas of Egyptian art and craftsmanship. 
It will be many months, perhaps years, before 
all the material is before the world in the shape of 
colour reproductions of the various articles, and 
until this work is completed comparisons with 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 195 


already known work cannot be made. Much 
that has been said with regard to the revolution 
in our ideas of Egyptian art which is to be 
brought about by the revelations of Tutankh- 
amen’s tomb may have to be qualified or with- 
drawn in the light of fuller and more leisurely 
study, and certain things which were for the 
moment acclaimed as masterpieces will beyond 
doubt be deposed from an eminence which they 
would never have attained save under the 
influence of the enthusiasm of the moment. 
Still, even when all deductions have been made, 
there will remain an amount of material of the 
very highest quality, such as has never before 
been gathered together for the study of one of 
the most interesting periods of Egyptian history 
and art. ; 
Already it is manifest that some of the articles 
are quite without parallel in any existing collec- 
tion of Egyptian antiquities. Parallels to most 
of them, probably to all, doubtless existed, and 
we can well imagine that even the finest things 
may have been far surpassed by the magnificence 
of a really great Pharaoh, such as Amenhotep III ; 
but these splendours of the culminating period of 
the Empire no longer exist, or at least have not 
yet come to light, and we were obliged to form 
our conception of them from reliefs and paintings, 
and to fill in the details of their magnificence from 
our knowledge of the grandeur of the monarch 
for whose use they were made. Now for the 
first time we can see the actual creations them- 
selves, and even if they belong, not to one of the 
greatest of the Pharaohs, but to a comparatively 


196 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


undistinguished monarch, still they represent 
the art of a period not far removed from the 
historic culmination of Egypt’s greatness, and 
it is quite within the bounds of possibility, as 
we shall see, that some of the most striking 
of them do indeed belong to the greater age 
of Tutankhamen’s ancestors, rather than to 
his own. 

Of all the articles so far removed from the 
tomb, the one which has attracted the most 
attention, and excited the most admiration, has 
been the Royal Throne, or Chair of State, which 
was found in the outer chamber. “ It is one of 
the wonders of the world,” was the comment of 
Professor Breasted on his first view of it, and 
there seems to be little doubt that this enthusiastic 
praise is well deserved. Within the last quarter 
of a century, two of the royal thrones of two of 
the greatest empires of the ancient world have 
been brought to light, and the simple dignity of 
the Throne of Minos, discovered by Sir Arthur 
Evans in the Palace of Knossos, forms a most 
effective contrast and foil to the gorgeousness of 
the Throne of Tutankhamen of Thebes, from 
which it may be separated in date by not much 
more than acentury, the Cretan throne being the 
earlier, and indeed the earliest royal throne known 
to exist. 

The Throne of Tutankhamen is of wood, 
covered with a thin plating of gold and adorned 
with finely carved lions’ heads. The arms of the 
chair are of modelled wood also overlaid with 
gold, and beneath them, on either side, is a 
sacred ureeus, partly wrought in glaze, with the 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 197 


crown of Egypt in silver. On the back of the 
throne is a panel of beautiful workmanship, on 
which the king is represented seated, with his 
legs crossed, and giving his hand to the Queen, 
who is standing—a motive which in its uncon- 
ventionality speaks distinctly of the realistic 
art of Tell el-Amarna, and suggests comparisons 
with the famous Berlin relief in which Akhenaten 
leans on his staff, while his Queen Nefertiti 
holds out a lotus bloom for him to sniff. The 
exposed flesh of the faces and other parts of the 
body is beautifully modelled in semi-opaque 
reddish glaze, while the King’s costume is 
rendered in painting overlaid with crystal. The 
queen’s dress is wrought in silver, and beside her, 
on a table, there stands a charming bouquet 
formed of semi-precious stones inlaid. ‘The seat 
of the throne is patterned with blue, white, and 
gold mosaic squares, set in diagonal lines. The 
whole effect is gorgeous in the extreme, and the 
description of the workmanship takes one’s mind 
back at once to the King’s Gaming Board of the 
Palace of Knossos, with its blaze of blue and gold 
and crystal on ivory. Whether we are to infer 
Cretan influence in the Egyptian splendour, or 
whether Crete derived from earlier Egyptian 
work, is a question which may prove of interest 
in the future. At any rate, we know that the 
two great cultures were for many centuries in 
the closest touch, and that each borrowed from 
the other, adapting the foreign ideas to its own 
tastes. 

One of the features of the throne is highly 
suggestive of the conditions of Tutankhamen’s 


1988 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


reign. On the gold plating of the chair, the royal 
cartouche has been altered, and shows the name 
which the king adopted after his conversion to 
orthodoxy. At the side of the arms, however, 
the cartouche, wrought in inlay of semi-precious 
stones and glass, remains unaltered, and still 
shows the old heretical form Tutankhaten. The 
manifest reason for the difference is that while 
it was comparatively easy to alter a cartouche 
wrought in gold plate, it was very much the 
opposite with one wrought in inlay. ‘Tutankh- 
amen, spite of his royal dignity, had, like 
Mrs. Gilpin, a frugal mind, and could see no 
sense in discarding his old Tell el-Amarna 
throne, even though it could not be perfectly 
adapted to his change of circumstances and of 
faith, 

So the throne survives to tell us, not only of 
the wonderful artistic skill of the Egyptian crafts- 
man of 3300 years ago, but also of the difficulties 
and inconsistencies of such a period of transition 
as that in which Tutankhamen’s lot was cast. 
On the stele which he set up at Karnak, and which 
is now in the Cairo Museum, the king has 
described the miserable state of the kingdom on 
his accession. “When His Majesty became 
King of the South, the whole country was in a 
state of chaos, similar to that in which it had been 
in primeval times. From Elephantine to the 
Swamps of the Delta the properties of the 
temples of the gods and goddesses had been 
destroyed, their shrines were in a state of ruin, 
and their estates had become a desert." Weeds 
grew in the courts of the temples.” He tells 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 199 


us of the wonders of restoration which he 
accomplished when “‘ Egypt and the Red Land 
came under his supervision, and every land 
greeted his will with bowings of submission.” 

But Horemheb’s Coronation Inscription sug- 
gests a somewhat different state of affairs from 
the picture of restored prosperity which Tutankh- 
amen presents, and the hatred with which the 
later monarch pursued the memory of his 
predecessor hints that the reign of the half- 
heretic king was but reluctantly accepted, as a 
stage on the way to the full restoration of the 
ancient state of affairs—a stage whose fitting 
emblem is the throne with its symbols of the old 
faith and the new intermingled. 

One of the most interesting among the finds 
of the outer chamber is that of the boxes con- 
taining royal robes, both of the King and the 
Queen. Whether it may be found possible 
to preserve permanently these exquisitely dainty 
fabrics remains to be seen; meanwhile it may 
be said that what has been seen of them enhances 
our respect for the skill of the weavers of the 
XVIIth Dynasty who wrought such super- 
latively fine stuffs. Incidentally, the Queen’s 
robes give us a curious link with the Egypt of a 
day far earlier than even that of ‘Tutankhamen. 

In the Westcar Papyrus we are told how King 
Seneferu, the last king of the IlIrd Dynasty, 
about seventeen hundred years before the time of 
Tutankhamen, feeling bored one day, called to 
him the wizard Zazamankh, and demanded a 
cure for his ennui, and how the wizard prescribed 
a sail in the royal barge manned by twenty of the 


200 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


most beautiful maidens of the royal harem. 
‘“ Bring me twenty oars of ebony inlaid with 
gold, with blades of light wood, inlaid with 
electrum ; and bring me twenty maidens, fair 
in their limbs, their bosoms and their hair, all 
virgins ; and bring me twenty fishing-nets, and 
give these nets unto thé maidens for their 
garments.’ Now the Queen’s robes, found in 
the tomb, “‘ are made of the daintiest diaphanous 
bead net material.’”’ Evidently the taste which 
inspired the novel prescription of the IIIrd 
Dynasty wizard persisted in the Egyptian Court. 
We should have inferred as much from the reliefs 
and paintings which have come down to us, but 
the robes from the ‘Tutankhamen tomb are the 
solitary specimens of the royal dress of ancient 
Egypt which have survived to the present day. 
Along with these robes may be grouped the 
so-called coat of mail, which is one of the wonders ~ 
of the ceremonial art of the time. ‘The general 
type of this wonderful garment is familiar from 
Wilkinson’s representation of the corselet pictured 
in the tomb of Ramses III, with its overlapping 
scales of metal. In the case of ‘Tutankhamen’s 
corselet, however, the scales, instead of being 
of bronze on leather, are pear-shaped links of 
faience laid on gold and backed with linen, 
which, of course, has almost entirely perished, 
rendering the reconstitution of the coat a 
matter of great difficulty. ‘The collar shows a 
rich pattern of concentric rings and rectangular 
plaques of faience in deep turquoise blue, and 
red and yellow. Below the collar, and wrought 
into the breast of this superb piece of mail, is a 





25. HEAD OF THE HATHOR=COW, DER /EL-BAHRT,. 





TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 201 


brilliant design stretching right across the chest, 
representing the hawk-headed Horus introducing 
Tutankhamen to Amen. Should it be possible 
to ERE See the restoration of this beautiful 
piece of design, we shall be in possession of a 
unique specimen of the Egyptian armourer’s 
art, though, of course, it is such a piece of 
armour as was never destined to be worn on 
active service, but only on ceremonial occasions. 
Indeed, it is probable that the ceremonial 
occasion for which it was designed was that of 
the King’s funeral; for we know from the 
Rainer Papyrus that such corselets formed, at 
least in later days, an essential portion of the 
royal funerary furnishing—so much so that the 
funeral could not be completed without them. 

Between six and seven hundred years after 
the time of Tutankhamen, the funeral of Eijor- 
horeru, prince of Heliopolis, could not be 
completed because Ka. amenhotep, prince of 
Mendes, had stolen his funerary breastplate. 
Pimay, the son of the dead prince, has to win the 
corselet back in a tournament before he can get 
his father buried with the proper ceremonies. A 
matter of seven hundred years is nothing in the 
life of an Egyptian custom; and there can be 
little doubt that the corselet of Tutankhamen is 
just such a ceremonial breastplate as that for whose 
possession Pimay and his allies fought in tourney 
against Ka. amenhotep and his friends, with 
Pedubast of Tanis, overlord of the Delta, as 
judge of the passage of arms. 

Among the other articles of royal wearing 
apparel were the magnificent sandals with their 


202 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


decoration of golden ducks’ heads and gold 
roundels. ‘The leather of the sandals had almost 
entirely perished with the lapse of time, being 
turned into a substance more like glue; but it 
retained sufficient tenacity to hold the decorative 
work together, and to let us see how magnificently 
a Pharaoh of the Empire was shod and how 
gorgeous were the feet before which the vassal 
kings of Syria and the Soudan bowed down, 
“seven times and seven times.” Interesting 
too, in their own way, were the child’s linen 
glove, and the child’s tippet, of linen with sequin 
decoration. Speculation has framed, on the 
basis of the small size of these and other articles, 
the theory that the king died in early youth, in 
fact when he had scarcely emerged from child- 
hood. We know nothing, however, of the reason 
for the presence of these articles in the tomb ; 
and the foundation for such speculations is 
far too slight to bear the weight of inference 
which it is sought to rear upon it. From other 
and more satisfactory reasons it has been inferred 
that Tutankhamen died in early maturity ; but 
that is a different matter. 

Nothing is more fitted to reconcile us to the 
destiny which has decreed that we should live 
in the drab and unpicturesque twentieth century 
than the contemplation of the inconveniences 
with which the kings and great folk of the bygone 
ages had to put up in the midst of the glittering 
splendours which dazzle our imagination. One 
of these is hinted at by the presence in the tomb 
of the candlesticks which bore the light of 
Tutankhamen’s days. They are small bronze 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 203 


articles, shaped in the form of the Ankh, and 
carrying fastened to them linen wicks, which were, 
no doubt, soaked in oil. As small pieces of 
decorative workmanship, they are pretty enough ; 
but it is impossible to imagine anything much 
less satisfactory in the way of lighting than they 
would seem to be. No doubt there were other 
and bigger candlesticks than these, and we cannot 
imagine that a luxurious court like that of Thebes 
would not have something corresponding to the 
great stone standard lamps which flared and 
sputtered in the halls and corridors of the 
contemporary palace of Minos at Knossos; but 
even so, the lighting of an Egyptian palace must 
have been what we should think miserably 
inefficient, and Pharaoh must have been sorely 
put to it to find occupation for his evenings, when 
all the glitter of his gorgeousness grew dim and 
shabby in the light of the miserable smoking and 
flickering lamps which at best can have done 
little more than to make darkness visible. 

A prominent feature among the heaps of 
wonderful things in the tomb was the group 
of elaborately carved alabaster vases which has 
been so often figured and so much be-praised 
since the discovery was made. Of the interest 
attaching to these extraordinary vases there 
can be no question; but when we are told that 
they are ‘the most beautiful alabaster vases in 
the world,” it is time to enter a protest. They 
are nothing of the sort. _ 

As specimens of workmanship they are 
wonderful enough ; as specimens of art they are 
flagrantly bad,—characteristic types of an art 


204 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


which has passed its maturity and is on the 
downgrade. ‘The over-elaboration and the far 
too complicated character of their decoration 
are sufficient to condemn them, and they are not 
to be compared for one moment, from the point 
of artistic value, with the simple and graceful 
forms of earlier work. Indeed, even in Tutankh- 
amen’s tomb, and in the same chamber with 
these over-praised and overdone pieces of preten- 
tiousness, there were vases far more worthy 
of praise for their artistic quality than the ones 
whose noisy ornamentation has singled them 
out for a notice which they do not deserve. 

Of all the objects so far removed from the 
tomb, none has attracted more attention, and 
none seems likely to create more controversy, 
than the group of extraordinary gilt state couches, 
the Lion, Hathor, and Typhon couches, as they 
came to be called. ‘The thing which drew atten- 
tion to them was not their beauty, for anything 
more hideous it is impossible to imagine ; it was 
their strangeness. With Egyptian couches and 
biers the world was pretty familiar before; but 
these were widely different, with their quiet and 
shapely lines, from the barbaric monstrosities 
of Tutankhamen’s tomb. ‘The heads of the 
couches present, indeed, some resemblances to 
familiar Egyptian types ; but even so, the sugges- 
tion which rises to the mind on viewing them is 
that these are Egyptian types interpreted by an 
alien temperament and executed by alien crafts- 
men. It seems almost impossible to believe 
that an Egyptian craftsman, with his tradition of 
taste and restraint, would ever have produced 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 205 


such abortions, calculated to produce nightmares 
instead of slumber in those who tried to rest 
upon them. 

Accordingly Professor Petrie has asserted that 
these couches are not of Egyptian workmanship 
at all. No Egyptian workman, he says, ever 
produced work assembled with bronze joints as 
these couches are ; they must have been produced 
in a distant country, and jointed in this fashion 
for convenience of transport, being reassembled 
on their arrival. Further, the decoration (trefoil) 
on one of them is characteristically Babylonian. 
Therefore it seems probable that we must look 
to Babylon for their origin; and Professor 
Petrie suggests that these are the identical couches 
to which the Babylonian king Kadashman-Enilil 
refers in one of the Tell el-Amarna letters, where 
he says, writing to Amenhotep III, that he is 
sending to the Egyptian king “‘ a couch of ushu 
wood, ivory and gold, three couches and six 
thrones of ushu and gold,” and other furniture. 

There is nothing unlikely in the idea that 
couches of such international importance, coming 
from one great monarch to another, should have 
been preserved for the matter of forty years 
or so, and buried as heirlooms in the tomb of 
the last of the line; and the suggestion lends 
an added interest to the ugly things. Sir 
E. A. W. Budge, however, rejects the idea, and 
asserts that the beast represented on the most 
hideous of the couches is simply the composite 
monster Ammit, “the Eater of the Dead,” so 
often represented in the Judgment Scene in the 
vignettes of the Book of the Dead. “‘ The 


2066 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


Mesopotamians knew of no such beast, and the 
couch or bier could only have been made in 
Egypt, where the existence of Ammit was 
believed in and the fear of her was great.” In 
support of his opinion he quotes from the 
Papyrus of Hunefer—‘ Her forepart is crocodile,” 
and anyone familiar with the Judgment Scene 
will remember that this certainly is so. The 
trouble is that whatever the hideous monster 
of Tutankhamen’s tomb may represent, “ her 
forepart ”’ certainly is not crocodile. It is ugly 
and sinister enough for anything; but no 
Egyptian craftsman would have dreamed of 
trying to pass this clumsy monster off as a repre- 
sentation of a crocodile—one of the most 
familiar of objects. 

Especially in view of the methods of construc- 
tion involved—a point on which no man is better 
qualified than Petrie to pronounce an opinion— 
Budge seems to have done nothing to invalidate 
the Babylonian suggestion, which, for the rest, 
takes its place very naturally, as we shall see, in 
the explanation of the extraordinary wealth of 
furniture found in the tomb of one of the least 
famous Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The 
couches seem, to an unprejudiced mind, just such 
work as would be produced by a clever workman 
working on motives which were quite foreign to 
his usual practice, and therefore producing 
results which, while they have a _ distinct 
resemblance to the types which he was imitating, 
yet show these as seen and interpreted by an 
outsider, and not by one to whom they were parts 
of his normal training. 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 207 


Of the statues found in the tomb, two, the 
life-sized ones of bituminised wood adorned with 
gold, were fine specimens of the normal type 
of tomb portrait; the third, the so-called 
** Mannikin,” was of a different class. It was 
only a half-length, and lacked the arms; but in 
other respects it was a careful and artistic piece 
of work and obviously a faithfully studied 
portrait. ‘The idea that its imperfect condition 
is due to the fact that it was a sort of glorified 
tailor’s dummy, on which the royal robes were 
fitted before being worn by the Pharaoh, may 
probably be dismissed without ceremony. It 
is not SP vinis why, in a period when court dress 
was of the most elaborate type, with long robes 
of fine linen falling to the feet, and wide sleeves 
coming almost to the elbow, the mannikin should 
have neither legs nor arms, which one would 
have judged essential for the purpose of trying 
the fall of the robe. Another view was that it 
was a portrait, not of Tutankhamen, but of his 
wife, Ankh.s.en.Amen. There can be no doubt 
about the quality of the portrait, though to talk 
of “ the strange pensive smile playing about the 
lips, recalling the baffling smile of Da Vinci’s 
Mona Lisa,” is to invite comparisons which are 
scarcely fair to the older work of art; but it 
certainly is not the portrait of a woman. It may 
be a head-portrait of the type not uncommon in 
Old Kingdom tombs ; or it may be part of the 
foundation of a copper statue, like that of Pepy 
of the Old Kingdom, though in that case it is 
difficult to see why it should have been so 
carefully coloured. 


208 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


In the meantime it is impossible to say much 
about the treasures of the cihoShayue Cheha 
and its annexe. Scarcely more than a glimpse 
has been vouchsafed of these, no more hall 
enough to whet curiosity and expectation. But 
there can be little doubt that the splendour of 
the two inner chambers will be in accordance 
with the preface to it which the outer chambers 
have yielded. No onecan doubt the magnificence 
of the great canopy, which in itself would be a 
treasure beyond price; and all observers are 
at one as to the marvellous beauty of the shrine 
with the four goddesses. The motive of its 
decoration is, of course, one perfectly familiar 
in Egyptian art, and is found in all ages. The 
beautiful pink granite sarcophagus of ‘Tutankh- 
amen’s successor and enemy Horemheb, for 
instance, has as part of its adornment another 
version of the same idea of the protecting goddess. 
But the detail of the Canopic Shrine, if 1t prove 
to be such, appears to be of a quality and inspira- 
tion rare even in the finest Egyptian work. For 
the rest, we can only wait and hope. 

A good deal has been said about the need of 
recasting our ideas of Egyptian history in the 
light of the new information which has been 
gained from the tomb of Tutankhamen, and some 
writers have hinted that our whole conception 
of the close of the XVIIIth Dynasty is wrong, 
and must be recast to square with the new facts. 
We are asked to discard the idea of an Egypt 
beginning to decline from the lofty position which 
she had held under Thothmes I]I and Amen- 
hotep III, and to substitute for this the picture 





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of an Egypt waking with renewed strength from 
the uneasy religious dreams of the reign of 
Akhenaten, and asserting once more, and with 
greater vigour than ever, her dominion in the 
realms of both politics and art. 

All this is merely a vain imagination. His- 
torically, no new facts have emerged from the 
tomb of Tutankhamen. It is scarcely true to 
say, with Budge, that “ we know no more now 
about the reign of this king than we did before 
Lord Carnarvon made his phenomenal discovery.” 
That would only be the case on the narrow 
reading of the meaning of history which would 
confine it to the mere recording of dates, con- 
quests, and legislation. The art of any period 
constitutes no small part of its history, and 
for the history of far-past times it is one of 
our most valuable sources of information ; and 
we may surely look for a large extension of our 
knowledge of the art of ancient Egypt in the 
reign of Tutankhamen from the treasures of his 
tomb. 

But so far as concerns the facts of what the 
king, and Egypt under his leadership, accom- 
plished in the matter of raising again the declining 
prestige and power of the Empire, we know no 
more than we did before the tomb was opened ; 
nor is it likely that when the work is completed 
we shall have gained much more information, if 
any, on this point. For the likelihood is that if 
there are any papyri beneath the great golden 
canopy, they will be of a purely religious type, 
versions of one or other of the different forms of 
spiritual guide-book which the devout Egyptian 

O 


—wtbinads 


210 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


carried with him on his long journey through the 
dark Underworld. 

The artistic value of the find is another matter. 
There can be no question but that this splendid 
collection of the finest work of the craftsmen of 
the XVIIIth Dynasty, by far the greatest assem- 
blage of such work known to exist, will prove of 
the utmost importance in shaping and correcting 
our ideas of Egyptian art at one of the most 
interesting points of its long development. 
Never before has such a mass of material of the 
highest class been available for study. Yet even 
here it would be rash to assume that the result 
will be any considerable modification of our 
views as to the period of culmination of the art 
of the New Empire. At the most, and assuming 
that all the art of the tomb is strictly of the time 
of the king with whose burial it is associated, and 
that its quality is all of the supreme standard 
which has been attributed to it, the net result 
would be the shifting of the apex of the curve 
a matter of thirty or thirty-five years, a small 
thing when we are dealing with an art whose 
history is written in millenniums. But it seems 
likely that even this is more than we need 
necessarily assume. 

There is always the possibility that in the 
tomb of ‘Tutankhamen we are dealing, not only 
with the splendours of one king, but perhaps 
also with many of the heirlooms of the royal 
house to which he belonged, in which case we 
should be faced with specimens of the art, not 
of one period of a few years’ duration, but with 
those of perhaps a whole century, perhaps of a 


TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 211 


longer period still. The work of sifting out the 
various sources and periods of the materials 
found in the tomb will prove a most fascinating, 
if also a most difficult, task ; when it is accom- 
plished—the work of years--we may be in a 
position to speak more definitely about the change 
or the confirmation which the tomb of Tutankh- 
amen has brought to our previous theories of 
the growth and decline of Egyptian art ; mean- 
while we must wait, with the assurance that even 
in the extremest case, the discovery can scarcely 
commit us to anything revolutionary of our 
previous conceptions. 

The mention of the possibility of some of the 
articles found in the tomb being family heirlooms 
of the XVIIIth Dynasty brings up the last 
question with which it is necessary to deal in 
this short survey. How does it come about that 
a Pharaoh of no great standing in the long line 
of Egyptian monarchs—a mere stopgap king, 
a pigmy between giants—was buried with sur- 
roundings whose splendour exceeds anything 
known in all the story of royal magnificence ? 
The discoveries of ‘Tutankhamen’s wonderful 
funerary equipment make us wonder what we 
may have lost in the fact that his is the only royal 
tomb which has been found practically unrifled. 
Had we found, for instance, the tomb of a really 
great Pharaoh, such as Amenhotep III, as intact 
as that of his descendant, we should have been in 
a better position to form a judgment on the 
matter ; but that unfortunately has been denied 
us. One suggestion may be made, with the 
proviso that it is no more than a suggestion, 


212 TUTANKHAMEN SPLENDOURS 


which may be confirmed or disproved by subse- 
quent investigation. It has already been sug- 
gested that some of the most curious, if not the 
most beautiful, of the finds are relics, not of the 
time of Tutankhamen, but of Amenhotep ITI, 
dating therefore from forty years before the time 
when they were stored away in the Valley of 
the Kings; and it has also been suggested that 
another very interesting article, the footstool 
with figures of Asiatic captives inlaid upon it, 
dates from an even earlier period, that of 
Amenhotep II, and is therefore a century older 
than the time to which the burial belongs. ° 

Tutankhamen, we know, was the last king of 
the direct line of the XVIIIth Dynasty. His 
widow, Ankh. s. en. Amen, was left in a most 
insecure position from which she made, as we 
know, a desperate and unavailing effort to 
extricate herself. May it not be that, with the 
consciousness that all the glories of her house 
were in danger of passing to mere usurpers of 
undistinguished origin, such as the obscure 
priest Ay, who succeeded ‘Tutankhamen, or the 
commonplace soldier Horemheb, who drove Ay 
from the throne, she secured at least some of the 
most treasured heirlooms of the royal house 
from desecration by hiding them in the tomb of 
her dead husband ? 

It is, of course, only an idea, which must stand 
or fall by the results of future study; but it 
seems, at least in the meantime, to offer a reason- 
able explanation of a point on which no other 
explanation is for the present forthcoming. 


CHAPTER VIII 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS IN THE LAND OF 
THE NILE 


ledge of the conditions under which life 

was lived in Egypt, of the organisation 
of society, of the arts and crafts by which the 
needs and tastes of the people were met, is due to 
the results of excavation during the last century. 
We owe, of course, a great deal to the statements 
of Herodotus and Diodorus as to the conditions 
which they found existing in their time; but 
the great source of information must always be 
the mass of first-hand material which has 
been gathered, mainly from the tombs with their 
wealth of funerary furnishings, by the work of 
the excavator. Therefore it would seem that 
the fitting conclusion to our brief survey of the 
various aspects of excavation should be a sketch 
of the life of ancient Egypt, with the arts and 
crafts which ministered to its necessities and its 
luxuries. Such a sketch must, of course, be of 
the slightest and least elaborated type, for the 
amount of material is so enormous that only the 
most salient points can be touched ; but it may 
still be true so far as it goes, and may perhaps 

213 


P iedse oF the the whole of our _know- 


214) MILER OAR TS) AINE GRP ts 


serve as an outline within which further details 
may be inserted by the student of ancient 
Egyptian life. 

First of all, we may take the framework of 
society. ‘Through the whole of Egyptian history 
the outline of this is very much the same, though 
there are many variations in the relative 
importance of the various parts. ‘The head of 
the state is always the Pharaoh, placed on a level 
immensely above even the most powerful of his 
subjects, but, as we shall see, by no means an 
irresponsible tyrant, but rather a limited monarch, 
governing in accordance with strictly defined 
customs. 

Beneath him are the great nobles and the 
great official class—two sections of society which 
were not in ancient Egypt, as in so many other 
ancient realms, virtually different names for the 
same thing. 

Then came the priestly class, at all times one 
of the most important in the land, and tending 
at certain periods, with the weakening of the royal 
power, to overshadow all the other interests. 

It appears that there was a definitely military 
class, with definite lands assigned to it for its 
support, though in the earlier days of the kingdom 
the wars were not the business of a separate class 
of professional soldiers, but were carried on by 
a general levy of the people. ‘The other great 
land-holding class of the nation was that of the 
husbandmen, who apparently were much of 
our own old yeoman type, holding their land by 
the payment of taxes. 

Behind these classes, which, so to speak, 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS ~— 215 


formed the backbone of the nation, came the 
shepherds, hunters, artificers, traders, and workers 
at other subsidiary occupations. ‘These held no 
land, and their occupations appear to have been 
mainly hereditary, no artisan being allowed to 
pass from one trade to another, or to have his 
children reckoned in any other class than his own. 
The various trades must have been organised 
more or less after the plan of the medizval trade- 
guilds, though in the case of Egypt the organisa- 
tion was apparently a national, and not a local 
affair. Beneath the tradesmen came the slave 
class, whose number varied pretty much according 
to the wars on which the nation was engaged, 
and their fruitfulness, or the opposite, in yielding 
captives. 

Slave labour was never a prominent feature 
of Egyptian life, and Petrie estimates the slave 
population of the land at its maximum at no 
more than a quarter of a million out of a possible 
population of twelve millions. 

To the imagination of most folk probably 
the mention of “ Pharaoh, King of Egypt,” 
suggests a typical Oriental tyrant, responsible 
to nothing but his own passions, and governing 
according to the whim of the moment. Such a 
picture may have been true of an Assyrian or 
Babylonian king, like Ashurbanipal or Nebuchad- 
nezzar, and perhaps the frequency of assassination 
in the records of the Assyrian kings hints that it 
was; but it certainly was not true of ancient 
Egypt. Pharaoh’s own grandiose inscriptions, 
and the fiction which regarded him as a god 
incarnate, may suggest unbridled power ; but as 


216 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


a matter of fact, Pharaoh was anything but the 
rampant and romantic despot whom we imagine 
distributing life and death at his own capricious 
will, but rather a somewhat humdrum constitu- 
tional monarch, whose every action was regulated 
for him centuries before he was born, by an 
unchanging custom, and who could no more 
step beyond the limits which immemorial laws 
had assigned to him than he could jump out of 
his skin, or off his own shadow. 

The thing which amazed the Greeks, with 
their experience of irresponsible tyrants, was the 
fact that so great a king as Pharaoh was not the 
master, but the servant of the laws. ‘‘ He could 
not do any public business, condemn or punish 
any man to gratify his own humour or revenge, 
or for any other unjust cause; but was bound 
to do according as the laws had ordered in every 
particular case. . . . The kings, therefore, carry- 
ing this even hand towards all their subjects, 
were more beloved by them than by their own 
kindred.” 

Petrie has suggested that it is this limitation 
of the power of the Pharaoh which is accountable 
for the unusual stability of the Egyptian throne. 
“The absence of republican interludes, so 
frequent in other parts of the Mediterranean, was 
apparently due to the monarchy being strictly 
limited by law. However bad an Egyptian might 
be personally, he could not earn the hatred of his 
subjects like the irresponsible Greek tyrants or 
Roman emperors.” 

Indeed Pharaoh according to fact is a very 
different figure from Pharaoh according to 





2yomeO RAT leAEL Cie ORME IN DU BVMETA SS CATRO MUS i UIMe 





LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS = 217 


imagination. We must try to substitute for the 
gorgeous tiger of our fancies the figure, gorgeous 
enough indeed, so far as concerns his apparel, 
of a laborious servant of the State whose life, 
instead of being spent in wild orgies of licence 
and wild explosions of ferocity, was mainly 
occupied, from the time when he rose in the 
morning to the time when he crawled to bed at 
night, in a manner quite familiar to royalty in 
our own country, in signing dull reports, and 
reading dull dispatches, presiding over long and 
wearisome temple services, and travelling about 
the country to see that everything was working 
smoothly. 

The new picture is by no means so picturesque 
as the old one; but it is the real Pharaoh, and 
no doubt it was for the good, both of his subjects 
and himself, that ‘“‘ Pharaoh had to act every hour 
according to fixed routine, without room for 
the licence of a Dionysius or a Caligula.” The 
brilliant tiger looks romantic in a story, but when 
his despotism becomes unbearable it has generally 
to be tempered by assassination, as with Sargon, 
Sennacherib, and many another ; but as a matter 
of fact the Egyptian Pharaoh generally managed 
to die quietly in his own bed when his time 
came. 

Not that he had not his own power, and his 
own initiative. His headship of the State involved 
headship of the army in war, and this was no 
polite fiction, where Pharaoh reaped the glory 
while his soldiers had the danger. Seqenen- 
Ra’s mummy, with its ghastly wounds on head 
and face, tells us how real was the duty 


218 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


of Egyptian royalty in the day of battle. 
Thothmes III led the van of his army through 
the defile of Aaruna, when his chosen captains 
shirked the task, and though we need not believe 
all that Ramses II tells us about his share in the 
battle of Kadesh, there is no doubt that he fought 
hand to hand with the Hittites in the forefront 
of the battle, and at least proved himself a good 
trooper, whatever may be thought of his general- 
ship. Much power also lay in his hands in 
respect of the selection and advancement of 
able men from the lower to the higher ranks 
of the public service, and of rewarding their 
work with grants of land, of initiating the great 
public works which were often of such untold 
benefit to the land, and of conducting the 
Foreign-Office business of the country, and the 
negotiation of treaties. In short, Pharaoh had 
no lack of work to do, and was probably like his 
modern successors in Kingship, one of the 
hardest-worked men in the land; but from 
start to finish, the Egyptian monarchy was a 
limited one. : 

Two instances of the limitation of the royal 
power, and its strict subjection to law, may be 
given. When Queen Amtes was tried, in the 
reign of Pepy I of the VIth Dynasty, for some 
unspecified offence, the trial was conducted 
without even the presence of the king. “ His 
Majesty,’’ says Una in his famous inscription, 
*“‘ caused me to enter in order to hear the case 
alone. No chief judge and vizier at all, no prince 
at all was there, but only I alone, because I was 
excellent, because { was pleasant to the heart 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 219 


of His Majesty.” Again, in the time of King 
Ramses III of the XXth Dynasty, there was a 
great palace conspiracy arising out of an intrigue 
in the harem to dethrone Ramses, and put the 
son of one of the harem ladies on the throne. 
In most other Oriental palaces the discovery of 
such a thing would have been the signal for a 
general massacre. Instead of executing sum- 
mary justice, Ramses appointed a commission, 
giving them these remarkable instructions: 
“ What the people have spoken, I do not know. 
Hasten to investigate it. You will go and 
question them, and those who must die, you will 
cause to die by their own hand, without my 
knowing anything of it. You will also cause the 
punishment awarded to the others to be carried 
out without my knowing anything of it.” 

Pharaoh may not always have been a model 
of propriety or of rectitude; but he was far 
too strictly hedged about by precedent to allow 
of the brutal tyranny and licence which have so 
often marked other Eastern monarchies, and, 
besides, one fails to see how, with his time so 
completely filled as we know it to have been, 
with all sorts of necessary routine, he can have 
had much opportunity for mischief, even if he 
had the desire. 

The king’s chief functionary and right-hand 
man was the Vizier, who must have been just 
about as hard-worked a man as his master. ‘The 
inscription in the tomb of Rekhmara, who was 
vizier under Thothmes III, enumerates thirty 
separate functions which had to be discharged 
by the fortunate holder of this great office. “ The 


220 # LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


vizier is Grand Steward of all Egypt, and all the 
activities of the State are under his control. 
He has general oversight of the treasury, and the 
chief treasurer reports to him ; he is chief justice, 
or head of the judiciary ; he is chief of police, 
both for the residence-city and the kingdom ; 
he is minister of war, both for army and navy ; 
he is secretary of the interior and of agriculture, 
while all general executive functions of State, 
with many that may not be classified, are 
incumbent upon him. There is indeed no 
prime function of the State which does not 
operate through his office. He is a veritable 
Joseph, and it must be this office which the 
Hebrew writer has in mind in the story of 
Joseph.” Altogether we may conclude that, 
whatever the salary of the vizier may have been, 
he probably earned it. 

A quaint picture of the way in which a high 
Egyptian official was hedged about with routine 
is given’ by Rekhmara in his description of the 
procedure of the court of justice. ‘“ As for every 
act of this official, the vizier while hearing in 
the hall of the vizier, he shall sit upon a chair, 
with a rug upon the floor, and a dais upon it, a 
cushion under his back, a cushion under his feet, 
and a baton at his hand ; the forty skins [parch- 
ments of the codified law] shall be open before 
him. Then the magnates of the South shall 
stand in the two aisles before him, while the 
master of the privy chamber is on his right, 
the receiver of income on his left, the scribes of 
the vizier at his either hand ; one corresponding 
to another, with each man at his proper place. 


PApE ARTS, "AND, CRAFTS 221 


One shall be heard after another, without 
allowing one who is behind to be heard before 
one who is in front.” 

The great offices of State, of course, often fell 
to men of high rank, and of hereditary influence. 
Rekhmara himself came of noble family, and 
succeeded his uncle in the vizierate. But this 
was by no means necessarily the case. Egypt 
always presented the career open to talent which 
Napoleon desired. “ All through the history 
there was a free rising of ability from the lower 
levels, as we see in England—Wolsey, the 
butcher’s son, and many others. . . . This was 
a chief cause of the durability of Egyptian society ; 
great as the differences were, there was a gradation 
interlocking all through, as in England.” 

A notable instance of the rise of a talented man 
is given by the tomb-inscription of that same 
Una whom we have already seen presiding over 
the trial of Queen Amtes. Beginning his official 
career as an “‘ inferior custodian of the domain of 
Pharaoh,” Una during three reigns steadily 
climbed up the official ladder, until at last he 
became governor of the South under Merenra, 
and was the favoured official chosen to fetch 
the granite for the royal sarcophagus and pyramid 
from the quarries at Aswan. Senmut again, the 
famous architect and minister of Queen 
Hatshepsut, tells us in the inscription on his 
statue at Karnak that he was “the greatest 
of the great in the whole land,” and seems to have 
held power not inferior to that of the vizier, 
though there is no evidence that he held that 
office ; yet he tells us in his Berlin inscription 


222 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


that “ his ancestors were not found in writing,” 
or in other words, that he was a self-made man. 

The elaborately organised court held many 
offices both ornamental and useful, which gave 
openings for talent or ambition. Perhaps one 
of the most influential positions was one which 
involved no very important duties, but brought 
the holder of it into close and constant touch 
with Pharaoh. This was the position of the 
‘““fan-bearer at the king’s right hand.’ His 
function was purely ornamental, and he can be 
seen in paintings and reliefs carrying a tiny fan 
beside the king’s litter as the symbol of his office, 
while the real work of fanning is done by the 
ordinary fan-bearers with their big business-like 
fans; but he was the highest court-official, a 
sort of Lord Chamberlain, with powers of giving 
or denying entry to the presence, and no doubt 
his favour was all-important to a petitioner, as that 
of one who had the ear of Pharaoh. As to the 
rest of the court, there was a multitude of officials 
quite comparable to the tail of useless boot- 
lickers who adorned the court of Louis XIV; 
but one imagines that, in earlier days at least, 
the courtier of Pharaoh had to do more for his 
position than the hanger-on of the Grand 
Monarque. 

The priesthood formed a very large and very 
influential class. In theory, the King was always 
the Supreme Priest, the Pontifex Maximus of 
the kingdom, and very often several of the high- 
priesthoods of the ‘different gods were held by 
members of the royal family, thus securing that 
the Pharaoh should be represented in the priestly 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS = 223 


councils whose loyalty or disloyalty might mean 
so much to the stability of his throne. Thus in 
the reign of Ramses II, his favourite son 
Khaemuast, the Wizard-Prince of the Setna 
papyrus, was high-priest of Ptah at Memphis. 
No doubt the fact that there was such a multitude 
of gods, whose priesthoods were all jealous of 
one another, was some security against the 
overwhelming influence of the priestly caste, 
especially in the earlier days; but the fate of 
Akhenaten’s movement showed that in spite of 
local jealousies the priestly caste was really one 
in face of any attempt to diminish its power and 
privileges ; and in the end the unquestioned 
supremacy of Amen led to the Amen priesthood 
gaining a position and influence which was 
superior to that of the weak Ramesside Pharaohs, 
and which resulted in the supersession of the 
true royal line, and the substitution for it of the 
XXIst Dynasty of priest-kings. Even before 
things had reached such a pitch, the immense 
wealth which the piety of successive kings had 
accumulated in the coffers of the priesthoods, 
and especially of that of Amen, must have 
constituted a real danger to the state, while the 
amount of land held by the priests, and so 
exempt from taxation, went with the other 
accumulation to constitute a steady drain on the 
national resources which in the end they were not 
able to bear. 

The class of the great nobles was held in 
strict subordination to the royal power in the 
days of the strong early monarchs of the Old 
Kingdom ; but, with the weakening of the royal 


224 LIFE, ARTS, AND. CRAFTS 


authority which followed the Vth Dynasty, the 
honours and powers which Pharaoh had heaped 
on his faithful courtiers, and which had been a 
convenient relief to the central authority as 
shifting part of the burden of local administration 
to the shoulders of the local great men, proved 
a danger to the State. A kind of feudal system 
grew up in which the local chieftains assumed the 
powers and as much as they could afford of the 
splendours of Pharaoh himself, claiming to hold 
their offices by hereditary right, maintaining 
their own armies, holding their own courts of 
justice, and even daring to place after their own 
names in their proclamations the formula, 
‘* Living for ever and ever,” which had hitherto 
been the sacred attribute of the crown alone. 

The revival. of the monarchy, first under the 
Antefs and Mentuhoteps of the XIth Dynasty, 
and then under the Senuserts and Amenemhats 
of the XIIth Dynasty, however, soon curbed 
the pretensions of these petty princelets, and the 
changes of the Hyksos invasion and the War of 
Independence wiped out the last relics of the 
Egyptian feudal system, which never revived 
under the New Empire. Even under strong 
kings like the Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, 
the courts of the local nomarchs were no small 
things, as they might employ anything from 
fifty to a hundred officials, from the steward down 
to the “‘ mat-spreader.” 

Tomb-inscriptions are not perhaps the most 
trustworthy sources as to the personal character 
of a class of men, nor are we to expect that Ameny 
or Khnemhotep will tell us anything of the shady 


“dH LHH-HVIid 40 AWOL “MYOM-ARITAWY ALSVNAG UA “Qe 








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LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 225 


side of their administration. Yet it must be 
confessed that Ameny’s story of his administration 
of the Oryx Nome gives a pleasant picture of the 
relations of a great local noble and official to the 
people of his province; and we may say that 
if Egypt in the time of the Middle Kingdom had 
many nomarchs of his stamp, she was a fortunate 
land. 

“There was no citizen’s daughter whom I 
misused,” says the great man, ‘“‘ there was no 
widow whom I oppressed, there was no peasant 
whom I repulsed, there was no shepherd whom I 
repelled, there was not a foreman of five from 
whom I took his men for forced work. There 
was not a pauper around me; there was not a 
hungry man of my time. When there came years 
of famine, I arose, I ploughed all the fields of 
the Oryx Nome to its southern and its northern 
boundary, I kept its inhabitants alive, making 
provision so that there was not a hungry man 
init. J gave to the widow as to her that possessed 
a husband ; nor did I exalt the great above the 
small in all that I gave. Thereafter great rises 
of the Nile took place, producing wheat and 
barley and all things; but I did not exact the 
arrears of the farm.’ “‘I gave bread to the 
hungry,’ says another noble, ‘‘ and clothes to 
the naked, and gave a passage in my own boat 
to those who could not cross. I was a father to 
the orphan, a husband to the widow, a protection 
from the wind to the shivering; I am one who 
spake what was good, and related what was good. 
I acquired my possessions in a just manner.” 

All this may savour a little of Pharisaic 

P 


226 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


self-righteousness to us; but at least it shows 
that there was a recognised idea, among the 
governing class, of the duties which a great man 
owed to those under him, and the possession of 
such an ideal must have made bad government 
more difficult. 

The same praise can scarcely be given to the 
ideals of the other important, though minor, 
official class, the scribes. The Egyptian scribe 
belonged to a type with which we are perfectly 
familiar still, the type of the petty official who 
thinks that there is nothing in all the world so 
fine as petty officialdom, unless it be superior 
officialdom, and who looks down on all other 
professions with a scorn which is only equalled 
by his ignorance. In a land where writing was 
so complicated a matter, and where it so early 
assumed supreme importance, where also the 
annual inundation with its obliterating of land- 
marks made the possession of written records a 
matter of great importance, the scribe obviously 
had a splendid field for his work, and for the 
development of all his peculiar vices. It was 
possible for a careful scribe to climb from the 
humblest position to one of great dignity and 
power, and the Egyptian scribe never forgot that 
every scribe carried in his writing-case the wand 
of office of a potential vizier. 

The scribes have left us many examples of 
what they thought of themselves and of all other 
people and professions, and it may be safely 
said that of no other class of Egyptian do we 
carry away so unpleasant an impression as of 
that one which no doubt imagined that it was 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 227 


impressing its own immense superiority on the 
minds of all posterity. ‘The Egyptian cherished 
a profound admiration for learning; but his 
devotion to letters was not because of the beauty 
of learning in itself, but simply because it was 
the avenue to preferment and the way of escape 
from the miseries of toil or the dangers of war. 
Both the admiration and the mercenary reason 
for it are expressed in the words of an ancient 
sage recorded for us in the Sallier Papyrus: 


“Give thy heart to learning and love her like a mother, 
For there is nothing that is so precious as learning . . . 
Behold there is no profession which is not governed, 
It is only the learned man who rules himself.” 


The scribe saw himself, because of his 
possession of letters, immeasurably above all the 
poor creatures who had to earn their bread by 
the sweat of their brow. He was exempt from 
all the pains and anxieties of the workman, and 
loved maliciously to contemplate them while 
he issued the orders which imposed further 
burdens on backs already heavily burdened. 
“The poor ignorant man, ‘ whose name is 
unknown, is like a heavily-laden donkey, he is 
driven by the scribe,’ while the fortunate man 
‘who has set his heart upon learning’ is above 
work, and becomes a wise prince.” ‘‘ The 
learned man has enough to eat because of his 
learning.” ‘Therefore, “‘ set to work and become 
a scribe, for then thou shalt become a leader of 
men.” 

No matter what the trade was, or how 
wonderful its results, it seemed to the smug 


228 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


scribe a contemptible thing in comparison with 
his own precious profession of letters. Here 
is his opinion of the craftsmen who created the 
miracles of metal- and wood-work of the Middle 
Kingdom : 


‘“[ have never seen the smith as an ambassador, 
Or the goldsmith carry tidings ; 
But I have seen the smith at his work 
At the mouth of his furnace, 

. His fingers were like crocodile skin, 
He stank more than the roe of fish... 
Each artist who works with the chisel 
Tires himself more than he who hoes a field. 
‘The wood is his field, of metal are his tools. 
In the night—is he free? 
He works more than his arms are able, 
In the night—he lights a light.” 


No doubt this seemed very fine and humorous 
to our scribe; but we who have the chance of 
comparing his literary achievement with the 
works of the craftsmen whom he satirised may 
be pardoned for preferring the diadems of 
Khnumit and Sat-Hathor, or the statues of 
Senusert and Amenemhat to all the paltry drivel 
he ever wrote. 

Nor was his opinion of the soldier’s calling 
any higher. Indeed the ancient Egyptian was 
no more of a warlike person than his successor 
the modern fellah, who makes a good enough 
soldier under British officers, but is about the 
most unmilitary person on earth when left to 
the freedom of his own will. There is no more 
curious inversion of fact than the common idea 
which pictures the Egyptian as one of the great 


"SOGAGV ‘I ALAS AO AIMNWAL ‘MUOM-AAITAN ALISVNAC U}X1LX 162 











LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS — 229 


warrior races of the world, and classes him along 
with that bloodthirsty tiger the Assyrian. Only at 
one period of his history did the Egyptian ever 
show the least sign of developing a craving for 
world-dominion and the warfare which goes 
along with it ; and when the brief imperial fever 
of his early XVIIith Dynasty had wrought itself 
out, he reverted for the rest of his history to his 
natural role of the finest craftsman on earth, 
only bestirring himself when there was need 
to defend his frontiers, a business which he did 
fairly, but only fairly, well. On the whole, he 
would have thoroughly agreed with Alan Breck 
Stewart that war “‘ is generally rather a bauchle 
of a business.” 

But it was reserved for the smug and flabby 
scribe—you can see him still in the Louvre with 
his cunning eyes and his rolls of unhealthy 
flesh—to make a mock of the calling which won 
for Egypt all the empire she ever possessed, and 
which was that of her greatest Pharaohs. 

“Oh, what does it mean,” says this early 
pacifist, “‘Oh, what does it mean that thou 
sayest : ‘ The officer has a better lot than the 
scribe ?? Come, let me relate to thee the fate of 
the officer, so full of trouble.’ Then he goes 
on to relate in a fashion which he no doubt 
thinks humorous, the life of an officer on active 


duty in Syria: 


“ Come, let me relate to thee how he travels to Syria, 
How he marches in the upland country. 
His food and his water he has to carry on his arm, 
Laden like a donkey ; 
This makes his neck stiff like that of a donkey, 


230, LIFE; ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


And the bones of his back break .. . 

If he arrives in face of the enemy, 

He is like a bird in a snare... 

If he arrives at his home in Egypt . . 

He is ill, and must lie down. 

They have to bring him home on the donkey, 

Whilst his clothes are stolen, and his servants run away. 


Therefore, O scribe, 
Reverse thine opinion about the happiness of the scribe 
and of the officer.” 


As literature this precious effusion is merely 
contemptible ; but it is very illuminating as to 
the character of the class which was responsible 
for the production of it. Generally speaking, the 
Egyptian leaves you with the pleasant impression 
that he is a decent kindly fellow, with a cheery 
outlook on life, and a love of pretty things and 
laughter ; but the scribe is an undoubted fly 
in the ointment. He thought himself its finest 
perfume ; but that is just precisely what makes 
him so unquestionably the fly. 

We need not imagine that the condition either 
of the soldier or of the artisan was quite so miser- 
able as the scribe would have us believe. The 
misfortune is that it was only the scribe who 
was vocal. If the soldier or the craftsman had 
been able to leave behind him his opinion of 
the scribe, it would probably have been quite 
as unflattering, and perhaps more pungently 
expressed. It would not have required great 
genius to make fun of a profession which lived 
by the favour of the great man, and whose typical 
figure is the kneeling scribe of the Cairo Museum, 
with his twisted deprecating smile, and _ his 


CIFE; ARTS, AND CRAPTS |: 231 


submissively crossed hands, waiting, like a dog, 
uncertain whether his master will kick him or 
fling him a bone. 

Behind all the glitter of the court and official 
circle, with its innumerable hangers-on, there 
comes the great mass of the people, the farmers, 
the skilled workmen, the shepherds, fishers, 
toilers of all sorts. Of no race in the world can 
it be said that the conditions of its workers have 
been so fully depicted as of the Egyptians. On 
the sculptured and painted tomb-reliefs we see 
the workmen of almost every trade under heaven 
busily engaged in the prosecution of their calling. 
Whatever the scribe might think of the indignity 
of being a smith or a carpenter, his impression 
was confined to himself, and the great man had 
not the least objection to see these and a score of 
other common occupations pictured on the walls 
of his ‘‘ eternal habitation.” But while the out- 
ward aspect of these callings is thus fully repre- 
sented, so that it might be possible to produce 
a handbook of the Egyptian crafts, we are not so 
well informed as to the environment in which 
these wonderfully skilled workmen spent their 
lives, what were the conditions of their service, 
the manner of their housing, and the question of 
whether their lot was a happy one or not. 
Petrie’s excavations at Kahun have given us the 
almost complete plan of an Old Kingdom 
workmen’s town, where the skilled masons who 
were building the pyramid of Senusert IT were 
housed. Though this is only a temporary town, 
we may probably take its conditions as more or 
less typical of those which prevailed for the 


232 ‘LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


artisan class in the Old Kingdom. ‘The houses 
are of all sizes, ranging from four rooms to sixty, 
the larger houses being, no doubt, those of the 
overseers and clerks of works. ‘The streets are 
narrow, varying from 11 feet to 15 feet wide, 
and having a drain down the middle of each. 
The simplest type of small house has an open 
court opposite the entrance, a common room 
on one side, and two storerooms on the other, 
with a stair leading up to the roof. The larger 
class of artisan’s house has a court, four rooms 
opening off it, and five other rooms dependent 
on the main rooms. On the whole, one would 
imagine that the housing conditions were not so 
very bad; though certainly the houses were too 
crowded together. The average artisan’s house 
of the present day has not the number of rooms 
which were possessed by the pyramid mason of 
four thousand years ago, though his advantages 
in other respects are considerable. 

The workman’s wages were at all events 
partly paid in kind. Herodotus tells us of the 
amount expended in provision for the workmen 
who built the Great Pyramid : ‘ On the pyramid 
is shown an inscription, in Egyptian characters, 
how much was expended in radishes, onions, and 
garlic, for the workmen ; which the interpreter, 
as I well remember, reading the inscription, 
told me amounted to one thousand six hundred 
talents of silver.”’ Payment was still in kind 
in the time of the New Empire. One of the 
foremen of the craftsmen of the Theban 
necropolis in the time of Ramses [IX (1142- 
1123 B.C.), fortunately kept with great care a 


¢ 


ReKORCOLIL “I Sal 


SAVA HO Hw 


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LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 233 


record of all that happened to his gang, noting 
whether the men were on full work or were 
“idle.” Festival days broke in considerably on 
their working time,'as we hear of two full months’ 
holiday, and again of another month, in the same 
year ; but the workmen’s rations ran on all the 
same whether they were working or not. The 
worry was that the rations were often behind 
time, and when that happened there was trouble. 
One month the rations were only one day late, 
but another they did not come at all, and then the 
workmen went on strike. This produced the 
supplies ; but ere long the same thing happened 
again, and this time the gang went in a body to 
Thebes, and complained to the “ great princes,”’ 
and the “ chief prophets of Amen.” Again the 
result was good, and the journal of the carefu 
foreman gives us a quaint hint of how it had been 
necessary to use a little palm-oil in the case ot 
the influential “‘ fan-bearer ”’ to secure the desired 
end. ‘‘ We received to-day our corn-rations ; 
we gave two boxes and a writing-tablet to the 
fan-bearer.”’ 

We cannot be sure whether the condition of 
the necropolis workmen, who were mostly skilled 
craftsmen, metal workers, carvers, painters, and 
so forth, was worse than that of the workmen 
in the city of the living ; probably the conditions 
in both cases were much the same. In any case, 
it is the necropolis workmen who supply us with 
our instances of insufficient or delayed payment, 
and who give us the first historic examples of 
strikes. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses III 
(1170 B.C.) things were pretty bad in the 


234 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


necropolis, and wages had not been paid for half 
a year. After giving the officials nine days’ grace, 
the workmen naturally went on strike in a body. 

They left the necropolis, with their wives and 
children, and though the two overseers tried to 
entice them back to work “ with great oaths,” 
the workmen were not to be caught with chaff, 
and stayed outside the necropolis walls. Finally 
the affair assumed so threatening an aspect that 
two chiefs of police and a number of priests 
tried to make them return to duty ; but in vain. 
Their answer was, ‘‘ We have been driven here 
by hunger and thirst, we have no clothes, we have 
no oil, we have no food. Write to our lord the 
Pharaoh on the subject, and write to the governor 
who is over us that they may give us something 
for our sustenance.” ‘This unheard-of request 
had its effect—‘‘ on that day they received the 
provision for the month Tybi.” In another 
month, however, they were back again, as 
supplies had failed once more. ‘This time the 
governor of the town met them, and though he 
asked them how he was to pay their wages when 
the storehouses were empty, he at least ordered 
that they should receive half of the overdue 
rations. 

Altogether the evidence goes to show that 
life was not all pleasure in ancient Egypt, any 
more than in other lands; but it is only fair to 
say that the other side of the matter has been 
grossly exaggerated, and that life in the Land of 
the Pharaohs was not the gloomy, morbid, 
perpetually death-contemplating thing which it 
has been represented as being. ‘This idea, of 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS — 235 


course, we owe, partly to the amiable Herodotus 
and his picture of the model coffin and mummy 
being carried round at all their banquets, with the 
words, “ Look on this, then drink and enjoy 
yourself ; for when dead you will be like this,” 
and partly to the fact that practically all the 
knowledge we have of the Egyptians comes from 
their tombs. 

The necessary corrective to this one-sided 
view of a great nation is given by their books, and 
particularly by the romantic fiction which they 
were the first nation to cultivate. Erman has 
said that ‘“‘ the romances are not to be relied 
upon; the country which they describe is not 
Egypt but fairyland.” This may be so as regards 
scenery and detail; but the writer of the Tale 
of the Doomed Prince, or of Setna and the Magic 
Roll, whether he may cast the scene of his story 
in Naharina or in Egypt, cannot help revealing 
in his tale the habitual outlook on life of the 
Egypt of his time; and in this respect the 
romances are far more to be relied upon than 
either the vainglorious vauntings of a royal 
inscription or the carefully dressed-up moral- 
isings of a scribe. The picture which they give 
of the Egyptian nature is that of a simple, kindly 
race, singularly free from the savage cruelty which 
disgraced their great rivals the Assyrians, loving 
pleasure, and all the brightness and beauty of 
life, with a straightforward and childlike affection, 
not greedy of power, but ready to live and let 
live, singularly advanced in their conception of 
family life, and especially worthy of our admira- 
tion in the respect which they paid to women, and 


236 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


the position accorded to woman from the very 
earliest times. 

It is time to rid our minds of that sinister 
conception of the Egyptian as a dark, uncanny, 
supernaturally wise and diabolically malignant 
being, which is still to be found in second-rate 
fiction, and in the vain imaginings of gropers in 
the occult and the miraculous, and to see this 
great race as it really was—a race of true children 
of the Sun, leading in the dawn of the world’s 
story a clean, healthy, open-air life, with its 
own imperfections and weaknesses, but with its 
plain virtues as well, and with a moral standard 
not unworthy of comparison with that of any 
race in the world. What they have accomplished 
is plain for all the world to see; surely it is 
common sense to see also that such things were 
not the work of gloomy fanatics or of drivelling 
dabblers in the black arts, but of men. 

We turn now to consider the art of ancient 
Egypt as it has now come to be known by the 
accumulation of specimens of it during the last 
century. Egyptian art has been somewhat slow 
in coming to its own in the judgment of the world, 
and that for two reasons. First that opinion, 
which had been accustomed to very different 


things, had to be gradually trained to appreciate 


the merit of work which differed from the 
accepted canons in many respects, even in the 
type of material which it used for its self-expres- 
sion ; and next, that the Egyptian work by which 
the national art was first introduced to the atten- 
tion of the modern world was mostly of a period 
which we have now learned to know as decadent. 





31. xxth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF RAMSES IH, 
MEDINET HABU. 


i 





; “J weil f an 


* 159 





LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS — 237 


Denderah, Esneh, Edfu, Phila, these were the 
products of Egyptian art which first roused the 
wonder of European visitors ; and very naturally, 
for these great shrines are not only wonderful in 
themselves, but are also in a state of preservation 
which renders them intelligible and attractive to 
everyone who sees them. But all the same they 
are very unworthy to be taken as examples of 
what Egyptian art could do at its best, and so we 
need not wonder that, when the first impulse of 
surprise had passed away, the voice of criticism 
was heard, pointing out the conspicuous faults 
in this claimant for recognition among the great 
arts of the world, and refusing to allow the claim. 
Similarly with the works of sculpture on which 
another part of the Egyptian claim must be based, 
in almost all cases the specimens of Egyptian 
sculpture which were first brought under the 
eyes of the judges were colossal fragments of a 
style and a period which had their own merits, 
but were far from being representative of the 
actual work of the Egyptian sculptor at its best, 
as we have now come to know it. 

In these circumstances it is not to be wondered 
at that Egyptian art has only found slow and 
erudging recognition as one of the great arts of 
the world. What is strange, however, is that 
even to-day, when the periods of Egyptian 
architecture are as clearly defined, perhaps more 
clearly defined than the periods of Gothic, and 
when Egyptian sculpture is represented all over 
the world by either originals or reproductions 
of its best work in all respects, the judgment which 
was not unaccountable, or inapplicable in the 


238 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


day of the beginnings of knowledge of things 
Egyptian should still be repeated, and Egyptian 
art be characterised as a thing, interesting indeed, 
but essentially crude and barbaric, the product 
of a race which has no claim to rank alongside 
the other great artistic races of the world. 

Thus we find so learned an art critic as Lord 
Balcarres remarking (Donatello, p. 21), ‘‘ The 
massive and abiding art of Egypt ignored the 
personality of its gods and Pharaohs, distin- 
guishing the various persons by dress, ornament, 
and attribute.’’ For the gods, this may pass, but 
when such a thing is said of the Pharaohs one 
can only say that it is simply the opposite of the 
truth. Is it possible that the author of such a 
statement had never seen, before he made it, 
such vivid impressions of personality as the great 
diorite Khafra, with its splendid dignity, or, at 
the opposite end of the scale, the Reisner 
Menkaura, the very embodiment of a bourgeois 
‘““ Farmer George” royalty, doing his best to 
look as dignified as becomes the wearer of the 
double crown, and failing so absolutely? Here 
are two successive occupants of the Egyptian 
throne, whose personality, according to Lord 
Balcarres, should be ignored in Egyptian art, 
and yet the sharp discrimination of personality 
is just the thing that immediately strikes everyone 
who sees the two statues together. 

Lord Balcarres, however, is not the only 
sinner in this respect. ‘“‘ The emptiness of the 
Sphinx’s face,” says Mr. March Phillipps in 
his charming book, The Works of Man, “is a 
prevailing trait in all Egyptian sculpture. All 


LIFE, ARTS,-AND CRAFTS 239 


Egyptian faces stare before them with the same 
blank regard which can be made to mean any- 
thing precisely because it means nothing... . 
The truth is, Egyptian sculpture is a sculpture 
barren of intellectual insight and intellectual 
interest.” 

Has the writer of this confident condemnation, 
one wonders, ever seen the granite Senusert III, 
either of the Cairo or of the British Museum, 
with the strong harsh features which express, if 
ever any work of the sculptor’s hands expressed, 
both the pride and the bitter weariness of power, 
or, to take a New Empire instance, the masterful 
Thothmes III of the Cairo Museum, the face of 
a daring soldier, if there ever was one, or the ugly 
capable face of Prince Mentuemhat, also at 
Cairo? Mentuemhat has no claims to personal 
beauty, and, one imagines, no illusions on that 
matter; but strong character has seldom been 
more admirably expressed than in this specimen 
of the art which, as we are told, is “‘ barren of 
intellectual insight and intellectual interest.” 

The fact is, that both these criticisms, and 
many others similar to them, rest upon a funda- 
mental misconception about Egyptian sculpture. 
It is quite obvious that both Lord Balcarres and 
Mr. March Phillipps, in making them, are 
founding upon the colossal pieces of Egyptian 
sculpture which are the prominent objects in the 
galleries of our Museums, and taking them as 
adequately representative of the art which they 
are criticising ; and to do this is hopelessly to 
misconceive the actual position. 

Egyptian sculpture in the round had two 


240 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


entirely different objects, which were reached by 
different methods, and are seen in different 
examples. The first was purely monumental 
and decorative, and its purposes are served by the 
production of the colossal statues, monuments 
of royal pride and glory, and, not less, pieces 
of decoration in a great architectural scheme. 
These gigantic works are not to be viewed as 
portraiture in the strict sense, and that the 
Egyptians themselves did not so view them is 
manifest from the fact that a reigning Pharaoh 
seldom hesitated to appropriate to himself any 
convenient statues of one of his predecessors by 
the simple process of cutting his own cartouche 
on the figure, and obliterating that of the original 
owner. | 

The question of likeness or unlikeness was a 
very small one; what was required was a figure 
which should convey the impression of power and 
dignity, linked with the name of a particular 
Pharaoh. In this respect, and as elements of an 
architectural whole, these statues unquestionably 
served their purpose ; more was never expected 
of them, and to criticise them as lacking in 
expression, and in individuality, is to do them an 
injustice. They can only be judged as what 
they were designed to be, not as something 
radically different. 

The position is quite different Hith regard 
to the other object of Egyptian sculpture, which 
was definitely portraiture. Apart from his monu- 
mental work, which in a limited sense may be 
said to have ideal elements in it, the Egyptian 
sculptor, unlike his successor,the Greek, produced 


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no ideal work. He was simply and solely, from 
first to last, a portrait sculptor, and in this respect 
he has seldom been excelled. The whole object 
of his work was to produce a tomb-statue, which 
should be the refuge of the Ka of the dead man 
when his mummy had perished by lapse of time. 
Therefore the one condition of his art was that 
it should produce likenesses as absolute as the 
power of man could compass. The result of 
such an aim is manifest, both in the successes 
and in the limitations of Egyptian sculpture. In 
the one point to which he gave his whole strength, 
the sculptor scored, not always, of course, but in 
many instances, a most astonishing success. It 
is impossible to imagine anything more lifelike 
than the heads of some of the Old Kingdom 
statues—the Ti or the Ranefer of the Cairo 
Museum, or among royal statues, the Menkaura 
with the figures of the Nomes, or in later times 
the exquisite Berlin head of Queen Nefertiti, 
the astonishing ebony head of a royal princess 
of the same period, who may be Queen Tiy, or, 
to come down to still later days, the other head 
of Mentuemhat which Miss Benson and 
Miss Gourlay unearthed from the temple of 
Mut, or in the very latest days of Egyptian inde- 
pendence, the head of an unknown man in green 
schist which is now in the Berlin Museum. 
Until the rise of Roman portrait-sculpture, 
no ancient school of art presents anything to be 
‘compared with the realism of the ancient Egyptian 
sculptor. 

Unfortunately for the completeness of his 
art, the absolute dominance of the need for 


Q 


242 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


recognisable likeness in the head limited his 
work in other respects. So long as the head was 
a success, the rest of the body did not matter so 
much ; and consequently we have, even in such 
fine examples as the ‘Ti and the Ranefer, a noble 
head joined to a body which is much less 
thoroughly studied, while in examples of poorer 
quality the contrast between the care with which 
the head is worked out and the rude blocking 
out of the torso and the extremities is almost 
ludicrous. Still, Egyptian art, like all art, is 
entitled to be judged by its best, and not, as has 
so often been done, by its worst ; and even when 
we admit all its limitations the fact remains that 
to charge it with incapacity to interpret indi- 
viduality is, to anyone who is familiar with its 
best work, merely ridiculous. 

The case is the same when we turn to the 
criticisms which have been directed against the 
other great branch of Egyptian sculpture—its 
relief-work. The great reliefs of the temples, 
with their battle pictures and scenes of offerings, 
are what at once commands the attention and 
invites the criticism. We are told, and very 
justly so far, that ‘ Kings, gods, prisoners, the 
smiting champion, and the transfixed victim 
are all equally expressionless. Clearly the idea 
that art can be charged with, and visibly body 
forth, the emotions and ideas of the human mind 
was never grasped by Egyptian sculptors ”’ ; 
but who in the world ever dreamed of taking 
the vast advertisements of the glory and valour 
of Pharaoh, for that is what the battle reliefs of 
Karnak and Medinet Habu are—contract work, 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS —— 243 


at so much the square yard—as fair repre- 
sentatives of the delicate and most decorative 
work which has given us the tomb-reliefs of the 
Old Kingdom ? 

In some respects Egyptian relief-work is 
decidedly inferior to the remarkable animal 
sculpture with which the Assyrian kings decorated 
their palaces. The Egyptian sculptor rarely 
attempts anything like the difficulty of the 
problems of motion which the Assyrian tackled 
with such dash and light-heartedness, and when 
he does make the attempt his work is apt to seem 
stiff beside that of his rival, whose hunting 
scenes have rarely been equalled; but in his 
portrayal of quiet scenes of home, field, and 
farmyard the Egyptian comes to his own again, 
and it is difficult to imagine anything more 
effective as wall decoration than his quiet and 
unstrained work, which, unlike that of the bitter 
Assyrian, almost invariably leaves a pleasant 
impression on the mind. 

The comprehension and appreciation of 
Egyptian architecture has been hindered by the 
same fact which has delayed the appreciation of 
the art of the Nile Valley—namely, that the 
specimens of it which are to-day the most 
complete, and which command for that reason 
most attention, belong, not to the days when 
Egypt was at the summit of her achievement in 
all respects, but to periods when taste and artistic 
feeling were decaying along with power. To 
take, as is often done, such a temple as Medinet 
Flabu as fairly representative of Egyptian archi- 
tecture, is simply to make adequate appreciation 


244. LIFE, "ARTS, AND CRAKTS 


of what Egyptian architecture is a _ thing 
impossible. ‘The Egyptian builders had, no 
doubt, great faults, which have already been 
touched upon. ‘They were often, indeed almost 
always, strangely careless about the very factors 
which should ensure the “ eternal duration ”’ 
which they craved for the works of their hands ; 
they had, generally speaking, comparatively little 
of that exquisite sense of proportion which makes 
a fine Greek temple seem a thing inevitable, 
though sometimes, as at Der el-Bahri, and the 
little temple of Amenhotep III at Elephantine, 
now, alas, destroyed, something of this was 
revealed to them ; they sometimes mistook mere 
mass for greatness, and the multiplication of 
forms for beauty, as in the Hypostyle Hall at 
Karnak, where a magnificent opportunity was 
lost because the architect did not know that too 
much is too much. But with it all they have 
left us a heritage of which it can safely be said 
that few of the works of man can surpass it in 
impressiveness. ‘‘ It is a part of my intention,” 
says Mr. Lethaby (Architecture, pp. 65, 66), ‘ to 
try to point out what contributions were made to 
universal architecture by the several civilisations 
as they arose and passed away, but to do so of 
Egypt would be practically to rewrite what has 
been said; to a large degree Architecture is an 
Egyptian art.” 

The nation of which such a statement can be 
made needs no further witness as to its place 
among the great master-building nations of the 
world’s history. 

Whatever hesitations and doubts there may 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS ~— 245 


be as to the right of the ancient Egyptian to rank 
high among the artistic nations of the world, 
there can be none as to his place as a craftsman. 
In prehistoric days he was already the finest 
flint-worker that the world has ever known, so 
that his flint knives are to this day the standards 
by which all other similar work falls to be tested, 
and in presence of which it always comes short ; 
while his vessels of hard stone were shaped, with 
a skill and a patience which to us seem little 
short of marvellous, into shapes of grace and 
beauty which have never been surpassed by 
the workers of any land or time. Later he 
translated these into fine pottery, and was always 
a skilful and satisfying potter, though his work 
never perhaps attained the grace and beauty of 
that of his brother craftsman over the sea in 
Crete. His greatest gift to us in this respect was 
his development of the art of covering pottery of 
all kinds with the exquisite glazes which still 
charm us on scarabs, amulets, ushabti figures, 
and all sorts of vessels. 

As a linen worker, of course, he was incom- 
parable, and the finest specimens of modern 
linen look wretchedly coarse when viewed under 
a microscope alongside the best products of his 
loom. The earliest jewellery of the world was 
of his workmanship, and the bracelets of the 
Ist Dynasty queen found at Abydos show us 
that the Egyptian jeweller of six thousand years 
ago needed no lessons from any of the most skilled 
modern practitioners of the crafts. Indeed, all 
through the history of the land the craftsmanship 
of the goldsmith was beyond reproach. In the 


246 LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS 


later periods his design was much inferior to the 
happy inspirations of the morning of art, though 
his technique was fairly well maintained to the 
end; but in the best days of the craft, which 
pretty closely correspond to the best days of 
the history, design and technique were alike 
admirable. 

Anything finer in their own way than the 
diadems of Khnumit, the royal crown, or the 
pectorals of the Lahun treasure, it is impossible 
to imagine, while if the standard of the furniture 
in the tomb of Tutankhamen is maintained by 
the jewellery, we may look for evidence from this 
source that the skill of the craftsman had not 
degenerated in the interval between the Middle 
Kingdom and the New Empire. 

With regard to woodwork, the evidence of the 
furniture which has been found in the tombs is 
conclusive both as to the skilful and sound design 
of the Egyptian cabinet-maker, and as to his 
careful and accurate workmanship. The chairs, 
the coffers, and the couches from the tomb of 
Yuaa and Tuau are delightful to the eye, with 
their simple and sensible lines, and suggest that 
they would be equally satisfactory in use. ‘The 
wonders which have been disclosed in the tomb 
of Tutankhamen have already been discussed 
in their own place, so far as that is possible at 
present, and while they reveal nothing new, save 
the ugly and clumsy state couches, whose 
provenance has been also discussed, they show 
an amount of richness in detail and material 
for which even previous discoveries had scarcely 
prepared us. 


LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS — 247 


Professor Petrie tells us that structurally the 
work of the Egyptian joiner was as good as it 
was satisfying to the eye, and the state in which 
his works have come down to us through so many 
centuries bears witness to the soundness of the 
materials which he used, and of the work which 
he put out upon them ; and perhaps the carefully 
moderate estimate of so great an expert is more 
impressive as to the quality of Egyptian crafts- 
manship than the multiplication of superlatives 
would be. ‘The powerful technical skill of 
Egyptian art, its good sense of limitations, and its 
true feeling for harmony and expression, will 
always make it of the first importance to the 
countries of the West with which it was so early 
and so long connected.” 

In sum the debt which the modern world 
owes to the culture of ancient Egypt is no small 
one. We owe to Egypt the first book, the first 
building, the first ship, the first statue, the first 
romance, the first relief, and the first picture, in 
the modern sense, of which we have any 
knowledge ; and if some of these anticipations 
are crude and primitive, and show but little sign 
of the wonderful development of which the 
future was to prove them capable, yet it is only 
due to this pioneer nation to remember that it 
is to her that we owe the seed which has borne 
so manifold a harvest. 


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INDEX 


AAHMES NEFERTARI, Queen, 160 

Aah-hotep, Queen, 27, 156 

Aashait, Princess, 99 

Abbott Papyrus, 128 

Abd-er-Rassoul, Ahmed, 
Mohamed, 158 

Abu-Roash, 49, 52 

Abusir, 50, 68, 69 

Abydos, Temple of Sety I, 31; 
Royal Tombs, 135 et seq. 

Akerblad, 14 

Akhenaten, 113, 118, 168, 171, 
172 et seg., 189 

Akhetaten, 174, 190 

Amélineau, 136, 140, 141 

Amen, III 

Amenartas, 26 

Amenemhat I, 72; II, 
Lids, 73, 31) 32 

Amenhotep I, 160; II, 100, 130, 
tomb of, 165 et seqg.; III, 
116, 148, 166 

Ameny, 224, 225 

Amherst Papyrus, 128 

_Ammit, 205, 206 

Amtes, Queen, 218, 221 

Ankh.s.en.Amen (Ankh.s.en.pa. 
Aten), 174, 189, 190 et seq. 

Antefs, the, 224 

Anubis, 186 

Apis, 19 

Archeology, methods and aims 
of, 35 ef seq. 

Architecture, Egyptian, 243 et 
seq. 

Art, Egyptian, 236 et seq. 

Artisans, condition of, 231 et 
seq. 


157 5 


735 


Ashurbanipal, 112 
Astemkheb, Queen, 130 
Ay (Pharaoh), 113, 188, 191 
Ayrton, Mr., 168 ~ 


Baccarres, Lord, 238 

Begarawiyah, 50 

Belzoni. /O)) 115 424/231) Os Oa 
105, 151-3 

Benson, Miss, 118, 241 

Biban el-Moluk, 148 et seq. 

Bib-khuru-Riyas (Tutankhamen), 
192 

Boghaz-Kyoi, 192 

Book of the Dead, 151 

Book of the Gates, 151 

Book of Him who is in the Duat, 


151 

Breasted, Prof., 41, 196 

Browne, Sir T., 61 

Brugsch, E., 158 et seq. 

Brune, 94 

Budge, Sir E. A. W., 205, 206, 
209 


CANOPIC JARS, 186 

Carnarvon, Lord, 177 et seq. 

Carter, Mr. Howard, 168, 177 
et seq. 

Caviglia, Capt., 63 

Champollion, J. F., 13, 14, 92 

Clarke, Somers, 96 

Corselet of Eiorhoreru, 201 

Corselet of Tutankhamen, 200 

Couches, State (Tutankhamen’s), 
204. et seq. 

Craftsmanship, Egyptian, 245 et 
seq. 


249 


250 


DADEFRA, 49 
Dahshur, 73, 77 
Dakhamun (Ankh.s.en.Amen), 


192 
Daoud Pasha, 157-8 
Davis, T. M., 168 et seq. 
Denon, V., 8, 18 
Der el-Bahri, 31, 87 et seq. ; 
Cache of, 158 et seq. 
Description de lL Egypte, 8 
Devilliers, 86, 91 
Diodorus, 213 
Drovetti, 9 


EDFU, 32 

Edwards, Miss A., 45-6 
Elliot Smith, Prof., 163, 173 
Eugénie, Empress, 29 


FAN-BEARER, the, 222, 233 
Fayum, the, 49 


GEBEL BARKAL (Napata), 50 
Gizeh, 48, 49, 50, 52 
Gourlay, Miss, 118, 241 


Ha tt, H. R., 96 

Hamed Aga, 155-6 

Hasan, Sultan, 62 

Hathor, shrine, Der el-Bahri, 100 

Hatshepsut, Queen, 31, 78 et seq., 
119g, 120, 168 

Hawara, 51, 73, 75, 76 

Henhenit, Princess, 99 

Hent-taui, Queen, 160 

Herodotus, 7, 213, 232, 235 

Hichens, R., go 

Hierakonpolis, 145 

Horemheb, 118, 168, 175, 190,199 

Hunefer, Papyrus of, 206 

Huy, 190, 191 

Hyksos Sphinxes, 26 

Hypostyle Hall, Karnak, 113 


ILLAHUN, 51, 78 

Imhotep, 70 

Ismail, Khedive, 29 

JEWELLERY, Egyptian, 78, 79, 
82, 142, 144 

Jollois, 86, gt 


INDEX 


KA.AMENHOTEP, 201 

Kadashman-Enlil, 205 

Kagemni, 71 

Kahun, 75, 231 

Karnak, temple of, 105 ef seq. ; 
Mariette’s work at, 31 

Kauit, Princess, 99 

Kemsit, Princess, 99 

Keneh, Mudir of, 27, 155, 156-8 

Khemuas, the Governor, 129 

Khafra, pyramid of, 53, 5_ 

Kha-Sekhem, tomb of, 142, 145 

Khenti, 139, 140 

Khnemhotep, 224 

Khnumit, Princess, 178, 182 

Khonsu, 111 ; temple of, 118 

Khufu, pyramid of, 52 et seq. 


LABYRINTH, the, 15, 108 

Lahun, 73, 75, 80 

Layard, 43, 156 

Legrain, work of, at Karnak, 108, 
III, 124 et seq. 

Lepsius, 14-16, 93 

Lesseps, F. de, 24 

Lethaby, W. R., on Egyptian 
Architecture, 244 

Lisht, 51, 73 

Loret, 165 

Luxor, work of Amenhotep III 
at, 117 


Maca ister, R. A. S., 9, 16, 
39, 41, 43 

Maghareh, Wady, 15 

Makt-aten, 189 

Mamun, 62 

Manetho, 137 

Mannikin, the, 8, 207 

March Phillipps, on Egyptian 
Art, 238-9 

Mariette, A., 10, 17, 18, 34, 93, 
156 

Maspero, Sir G., 10), 247 Seema: 
40, 41, 68, 101,124, E57; FO, 
164, 165, 168 

Mastabas, 58, 71 

Medinet Habu, Mariette’s work 
at, 31 

Medum, pyramid of, 54 

Memphis, 19 


INDEX 


Mena, 45, 137, 143 

Menkaura, pyramid of, 54-64, 
65; statue of, 238 

Mentu, 117 

Mentuemhat, Prince, 239, 241 

Mentuherkhepshef, Prince, 168 

Mentuhotep-neb-Hepet-Ra, 89, 
96 et seq., 147 

Merenptah, 117, 166 

Merenra, 70, 221 

Mereruka, 71 

Meroé, 15, 50 

Mertisen, 89 

Meryt-Aten, 189 

Moeris, Lake, 15 

Morgan, J. de, 78, 165 

Murray, Miss M. A., 102 

Mursil II, 192 

Mut, 111, 117, 118 


NAPATA, 15, 50 

Napoleon I, 7 

Napoleon III, 24 

Narmer, 143, 144 

Naville, E. de, 31, 95 et seq. ; 
102 et seq. 

Necho, 154 

Nectanebo, 20 

Nefer-ka-Ra, 68 

Nefer-ka-ra-em-per-Amen, 129 

Nekht, tomb of, 150 

Nesamen, Pharaoh’s Scribe, 129 

Ne-user-Ra, temple of, 69 

Nezem-mut, Queen, 160 


OsIREION, Abydos, 31, 102 et 
seq. 

Osiris, 139 ; bed of, 140, 141 

Osiris-Apis (Serapis), 19 


Passer, Governor of Thebes, 128, 
129 

Passalacqua, 10 

Pedubast, 201 

Peete rit.) 0. o, 132, 137 

Pentaur, poem of, 116 

Pepy I, 70, 218 

Pepy II, 70 

Perring, 14 

Petrie, Sir W. M. F., 47, 53, 61, 
66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 


251 


PEM ber ER eo ee TERS hp 
145, 205, 216, 231, 247 

Pewero, 128, 129 

Pharaoh, conditions of rule of, 
215 et seq. 

Philz, Obelisk of, 13 

Philip Arrhidzeus, chapel of, at 
Karnak, 121 

Pimay, 201 

Pinezem I and II, 160 

Pococke, 91 

Pool of Osiris, Abydos, 102 et seq. 

Predynastic tombs, 138 

Priesthood, the Egyptian, 223 

Proctor, R. A., 54 

Psamtek II, 154 

Ptah, 19 

Ptah-hetep, 71 

Ptolemaic work at Karnak, r1o, 
113,125 

Punt, 32, 95 

Pyramids, the, 48 et seq. 

Pyramid temples, 58 et seq. 

Pyramid texts, 70, 71 


QuFT, 161 


RAINER PAPYRUS, 201 

Ramses I, 110, 112, 113 

Ramses II, 26, 40, 113, 114, 117 
160, 162, 218 

Ramses III], 31, 111, 148, 160, 
165, 219, 233 

Ramses IV and V, 166 

Ramses VI, 166, 180 

Ramses IX, 128, 232 

Ramses X, 129 

Ramses XII, 151 

Razedef, 49, 52 

Rehoboam, 112 

Reisner, G. A., 68 

Rekhmara, 122, 150, 129 

Rosellini, 14 

Rosetta Stone, the, 13 


SADHE, Princess, 99 

Said, Khedive, 24-7 

Sallier Papyrus, 227 

Saqqara, Mariette’s work at, 31 ; 
stepped pyramid at, 70 

Sat-hathor-ant, Princess, 79 


252 


‘* Scorpion,” the, 143 
Scribes, the Egyptian, 226 et 


seq. 

Sebek-em-saf, 13, 130, 146 

Sekhmet, 117 

Semti, seal of, 145 

Seneferu, pyramid of, 51, 69, 
146, 199 

Senmut, 89, 122, 221 

Senusert I, 72 

Senusert IT, 51, 73, 75, 87, 231 

Senusert ITI, 73, 125 

Segenen-Ra, 160, 164, 217 

Serabit el-Khadem, 15 

Serapeum, Serapis, 19 et seq. 

Setna-Khzmuast, 40, 223 

Sety I, 11, 113, 148, 160, 163; 
tomb of, 153 et seq. 

Sety II, 113 

Sheshanq, 112 

Shubbiluliuma, 192 

Siptah, 166, 168 

Smenkhara, 188, 189 

Society in Egypt, 214 et seq. 

Sphinx, temple of, 60 

Strabo, 19, 102, 103, I51 

Strikes of workmen, 233, 234 


"TAHARQA, II2 

Tanutamen, 112 

Tell el-Amarna, 174; 
178 ; art of, 197 

Temples, Der el-Bahri, 86, 87 
et seq. ; Karnak, 105 et seq. 


tablets, 


THE 


INDEX 


Teti, 70 

Thothmes I, 119 

Thothmes II, 119, 160 

Thothmes III, 26, 100, 119, 120, 
E2r, 122, £25, 160,279 

Thothmes IV, 166, 168 

Throne of Tutankhamen, 196 

Lay at 

Tiy, Queen, 168, 171, 173, 174 

Tuau, 168 et seq. 

Tutankhamen, 36, 113, 
177 et seq. ; reign of, 188 

Tutankhaten, 174 


175» 


UMM EL-Ga’AB, 140 
Una, 218, 221 
Unas, 70 


VALLEY OF THE KINGS, 148 et seq. 
Vizier, duties of, 219-221 
Vyse, Col. H., 14, 64, 65 


WEIGALL, 168, 172 
Westcar Papyrus, 199 
Wilkinson, 92 


YOUNG, 14 
Yuaa, tomb of, 168 et seg. 


ZAWIYET EL-ARYAN, 68 
Zazamankh, 199 

Zer, King, 142, 144, 145 
Zeser, pyramid of, 51, 70, 146 


END 


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